The Undivided Past Page 16

  It is, then, no longer convincing to maintain that “the history of all hitherto existing society” is best understood and approached as “the history of class struggle.” To be sure, the pioneering Marxist historians opened up huge swaths of past human experience to serious scholarly investigation, and that will remain their abiding achievement. And there are some historians, mostly of the 1960s generation, who alternatively fear, lament, and deny “the death of Marxism,” continuing to insist that there was a bourgeois revolution in England in the seventeenth century and in France in 1789; that the “making” of the English working class did take place, albeit rather later than Thompson claimed; and that Marxist history-writing still has a future in the twenty-first century. But the credibility and conviction have long since gone out of such outmoded enterprises and nostalgic claims.118 The heroic narratives and broad generalizations that Marxist historians constructed have been overturned by the unprecedented research onslaught of the last twenty-five years, which means it is no longer possible to view the past as a succession of gigantic Manichean encounters between rising, struggling, and falling classes, which have always been the preeminent forms of collective human identity, driving the historical process inexorably forward. As long as the Soviet Union survived, Communism endured and some historians remained loyal to Marxism, but the demise of the Soviet Empire during the late 1980s effectively finished it off as a way of interpreting the past, and with its exhaustion also went the claims that class was the most important form of collective solidarity.119

  That, at least, has been the more realistic and resigned verdict of the older generation of Marxist historians. Christopher Hill gradually redefined his notion of the bourgeois revolution as being an intellectual rather than a class-based upheaval, and during the Thatcherite 1980s he shifted his attention from exploring successful progressives to describing “the experience of defeat.”120 Perry Anderson abandoned his multivolume Marxist history of the world before even reaching the era of so-called bourgeois or proletarian revolutions, and Gareth Stedman Jones gave up on Marxism altogether. Even Eric Hobsbawm, who had remained a member of the British Communist Party after 1956, admitted that times had changed. “Much of my life,” he has observed, “probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the Communism initiated by the October Revolution.” The best that could now be said for Marxist historians, he believed, was that they had “some practical experience of understanding the unintended and unwanted consequences of human collective projects in the twentieth century”; but that was hardly saying very much.121 As the preeminent form of human identity and the most significant category of historical explanation, class has had a great fall and, like Humpty Dumpty, it seems unlikely that the pieces will be put back together anytime soon.122

  CLASS IN HISTORY

  The most measured conclusion is that the political activists and academic historians who followed the doctrines of Marx and Engels, and who sought to apply them to understanding the future and the past, were as much in error as the two founding figures themselves had been, not only in overstating the importance of class as the most significant collective identity, but also in underestimating the abiding importance of other forms of human solidarity, some quite ancient, others still emergent. This was certainly so in the case of religion, about which Victor Kiernan regularly (though without many allies) berated his Marxist colleagues, on the grounds that they did not take the subject, or the identities to which it gave rise, seriously enough. “To this day,” he lamented, in a review of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution, “Marxism has scarcely corrected this underestimation, or made sufficient allowance in its general theory, for the energy and tenacity of religion,” which he at least was willing to recognize was “one of the defining forces in human history.”123 It was a telling observation, yet this was an underestimation that went uncorrected, by both Marxist historians and Communist politicians, until it was too late. Stalin may famously (or notoriously) have asserted that the pope “had no legions,” and that he, his faith, and his followers could be regarded with scornful indifference; but this was not the case in the late 1980s, when John Paul II commanded a Catholic population in Poland that had retained its identity as Communism had triumphed and subsequently crumbled, and that had refused to abandon its religious faith for this competing structure and system of belief.

  This indifference on the part of Marxists and Communists toward the power and appeal of religion in human identity was particularly ironic, since as Engels had come to recognize toward the end of his life, there were strong and suggestive resemblances between Christianity and Marxism, even as the followers of each saw those of the other as irreconcilably antagonistic.124 Both, after all, were built around a teleological narrative of history, which proposed collective solidarities in conflict, and led from an imperfect past and a sinful present to a glorious, redemptive, and transcendent future, in which good would triumph over evil. Both depended for their authority on sacred texts, written by the early prophets and about the early leaders, as sources of inspiration for the struggles, the sacrifices, and even the martyrdom expected of the faithful followers. Both suffered occasionally bitter internal schisms, caused by differences of doctrine and practice, which often seemed insignificant and incomprehensible to outsiders but led to accusations of heresy and acts of excommunication. And both held a Manichean view of the world, articulated in militantly denunciatory and apocalyptic language, in which antagonistic solidarities, based on a faith that subsumed and transcended all others, battled it out for supremacy. It is indeed a suggestive irony that Marxism and Communism appealed to successive generations of self-styled secular progressives, while being no less a religion than Christianity in relying more on the appeal of faith and hope than on fact.125

  Their preoccupation with economic forces and material interests also helps explain why Marxists and Communists failed to recognize the attraction of nationalism or the allure of national identities, not just to ruling elites but also to ordinary people, and to what the historian Geoffrey Best memorably described as the “flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting” side of the plebeian mind. They persistently underestimated the extent to which industrialization and economic growth, far from creating transnational classes, led instead to the intensification of national rivalries and solidarities. But they also underestimated nationalism because they did not like it and did not empathize with it.126 Isaac Deutscher claimed that Marx and Engels were great revolutionaries precisely because they were unfettered by the claims of nationality and had “seen the ultimate solution to the problems of their and our times, not in nation-states but in international society.” Members of the British New Left agreed: following The Communist Manifesto, they rejected the “narrow categories of ‘the national interest’ ” and dismissed nationhood and national identity as an instance of “the false identification of the group.”127 And in treating the history of nations and nationalism since 1870, Eric Hobsbawm not only made plain his lack of sympathy with the subject, but also insisted that the power of national identity had always been overstated and that the belief that it was “an irresistibly rising force ready for the third millennium” was no more than an “illusion.” On the contrary, he saw national solidarities as merely one more instance of the “politics of identity” that, by reason of “anachronism, omission, decontextualization and, in extreme cases, lies,” isolate one part of humanity from its wider setting. To all such solidarities and divisions Hobsbawm was deeply hostile—except in the case of class.128

  Notwithstanding their contradictions and limitations, the collective identities of religion and nation had existed long before Marx and Engels discerned the existence of classes and proclaimed their unique importance, and they may continue to exist long after efforts to establish the politics of class identities and attempts to write class-based histories have been discredited and abandoned. But there is a third collective
identity to which Marx and Engels, preoccupied by class, paid short shrift (although Engels did briefly address it toward the end of his life). For when, as they drew The Communist Manifesto to a close, the two collaborators urged that “working men of all countries” should “unite,” they showed no interest in the subject of female employment or indeed in the existence of any collective form of female identity.129 The Marxist activists who followed the founders were equally remiss: with the exception of Rosa Luxemburg, no woman was a major Communist politician in the fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution. And later Marxist scholars were no less guilty. E. P. Thompson may have claimed, in The Making of the English Working Class, that “class eventuates as men and women live their productive relations” (my italics), but scarcely any females appear in the ample pages of his very long book. And looking back on his essay “From Social History to the History of Society,” Eric Hobsbawm could only note in “embarrassed astonishment” that it “contained no reference at all to women’s history.”130 In recent decades, class as identity has been undermined in many ways, and the claims advanced for the alternative solidarity of gender have been among its most powerful solvents. Yet like religion, nation, and class, gender has its own limitations as a category of human solidarity, and it is time to examine those strengths and weaknesses.

  FOUR

  Gender

  Before you are of any race, nationality, region, party or family, you are a woman.

  —Germaine Greer,

  The Whole Woman

  Feminism constitutes the political expression of the concerns and interests of women from different regions, classes, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds.… There is and must be a diversity of feminisms, responsive to the different needs and concerns of different women.… Contrary to the best intentions of “sisterhood,” not all women share identical interests.

  —Quoted in Margaret Walters,

  Feminism: A Very Short Introduction

  IN 1825, almost a quarter of a century before the authors of The Communist Manifesto announced that class was the preeminent form of human solidarity, a wellborn and well-educated Irishman named William Thompson had published a very different polemic, urging the primacy of an alternative collective identity, entitled Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Like Marx and (up to a point) Engels, Thompson had rejected his privileged upbringing, but his evolving radical ideas had also been influenced by a woman named Anna Wheeler, to whom he addressed his Appeal, and whose inspiration he acknowledged. “To separate your thoughts from mine,” Thompson wrote, “were now to me impossible, so amalgamated are they with my own.”1 Anna Wheeler had been married when she was fifteen, but having borne six children, she left her drunken husband and went to France, where she joined a group of Saint-Simonian socialists. In 1820, her husband died, and Anna returned to England, where she embraced radical politics and met William Thompson. In the same year, James Mill published his Essay on Government, in which he argued for universal male suffrage but against enfranchising women, because they were all inescapably dependent on men, which meant they were incapable of forming considered views and so did not deserve to vote; nor, since their interests were already represented by their fathers or their husbands, did they need to do so.2

  Early in 1825, the republication of Mill’s Essay provoked Thompson into replying with his Appeal.3 In response to Mill’s assertion that there was no justification or need for women to be given the vote, he laid bare their systematic subjugation by men, which he believed was founded on the unjustifiable exclusion of women from all activities and institutions that were intellectual or political. “Business, professions, political concerns, local affairs, the whole field of sciences and arts, are open to the united and mutually sympathizing efforts of the males,” Thompson wrote, but by “shutting [women] out from all means of intellectual culture, and from the view of and participation in the real incidents of active life,” they were “confined, like other domestic animals, to the house and its little details.” While married women were “imprisoned at home … playing with bird, kitten, needle, or novel, the husband is enjoying abroad the manly pleasures of conviviality,” and this was true whether they were “the wife of the richest as well as of the poorest in the country.”4 Thompson went on to expose the exclusively male world of the political realm, showing how notions of “independence” and “intelligence” were defined and appropriated by men and enlisted for the oppression of women, and he directed his particular wrath at the fashionable concept of “public opinion.” Far from embodying the wise, disinterested judgment of all the people, it was a “male-created and male-supported” lobby, “the public opinion of the oppressors, of the males of the human race in their own favour.”5

  As Thompson’s title reminds us, the division of humankind into two distinct “halves” of men and women has been a near-universal phenomenon around the world since the beginning of time. Accordingly, it has often been asserted that men and women are innately different on biological grounds, which means they constitute two separate sexes, rather than embody any shared identity or common humanity. It is further argued that these anatomical dissimilarities are given their power and meaning by the laws, rules, values, customs, conventions, and cultures of gender, and that the combined effect of these physiological distinctions and social constructions has brought about the domination by (superior) men of (inferior) women.6 But it has also been claimed that the biological differences between men and women, and the relations they are alleged literally to embody, are minor compared with their overwhelming anatomical correspondences and the natural complementarity of the sexes, and the fact that humankind could not exist without both argues for a moral equality that should rightly inform social considerations. From this very different premise, it follows that if and when the artificial constructions of gender difference, hierarchy, and subordination are overcome and set aside, then women and men will cease to be two absolutely different and antagonistic identities, and each will thus be able to realize their full potential in the greater whole of humankind.7

  Yet paradoxically, the very universality of gender differentiation has made it a less cohesive and potent basis for collective identification and mobilization than virtually any other. There are so many men and women, they are so geographically scattered, and their circumstances are so varied that their shared awareness of themselves as men and as women has been more attenuated and taken for granted than other identities.8 In the case of the inferior “half” and “second sex,” this was something Simone de Beauvoir knew very well. “They live,” she wrote of women everywhere, “dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing, to certain men—fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are [attached] to other women.”9 And the result is that the identity formation, shared consciousness, and collective struggles that have been invented, created, and fought out in certain places and particular times in the case of religious, national, and class solidarities have been less in evidence in the case of women, and all but nonexistent in the case of men. To adapt the typology of class invented by Marx and Engels, there has been a great deal of gender “in itself,” as the inert categorization and passive characterization of humankind as men and as women; but there has been significantly less of gender “for itself,” since it has been very rare that some women have come to feel such a collective sense of identity as women, and men only rarely, if at all, seem to have done so as men.10

  DIFFERENCE AND INFERIORITY

  “Men and women,” the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed in her postmillennial polemic Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, “are further apart than we ever knew,” and in it she quoted three authorities, each of whom insisted that this defining difference between the two “halves” of humanity is primarily the result of biology. The first was her own mother: “Women can stand on th
e Empire State Building,” she warned her daughter on the latter’s thirty-first birthday, “and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it’s a lie.” The second was Dr. Edgar F. Berman, who was personal physician to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and an official on a national policymaking committee of the Democratic Party. In 1970, Berman declared his “scientific position” that “women are different [from men], physically, physiologically and psychically.” And the third is Pope Benedict XVI, who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, proclaimed in 2004 that a woman has “roles inscribed in her own biology,” and according to the Catholic Church, virginity and motherhood were “the two loftiest values in which she realizes her profoundest vocation.”11 (To these might be added the economist Professor Larry Summers, who, while president of Harvard University, and soon after Ratzinger’s remarks, wondered aloud whether women’s brains might be less capable of scientific research than men’s, after which impolitic speculation he was compelled to relinquish his job, which was subsequently filled, for the first time, by a woman.)12

  Thus do family, medicine, religion (and academe) combine to lament, declare, or proclaim (or hypothesize) that the differences between men and women are the natural order of things, since men have penises, testicles, testosterone, strong upper bodies, and male brains, while women have wombs, ovaries, estrogen, weaker upper bodies, and female brains. This view insists or implies that women are intrinsically inferior to men, and thus denies females and males a shared identity, and it has been in existence since the beginnings of Western thought. Aristotle, who often urged that the crucial difference between men and women was biological, considered women to be mutilated, deficient, and incomplete versions of men. They were both physically and mentally weaker, and as a result their position in ancient Greek society was so lowly as to be little better than that of slaves. Aristotle also insisted that women had colder bodies than men, and because he associated heat with life and soul, he concluded that women had less of each than men—a further indication of their physical and intellectual inferiority. This meant it was the male rather than the female who created new human life, since it was the man who contributed the form or essence of the embryo, while women merely contributed the womb and the nutrition that were necessary to maintain it during pregnancy. Being inferior to men in body and brain, Greek women, Aristotle believed, were rightly less well educated than men, and forced into marriages based on arrangement not affection; it was also fitting that they be denied active participation in the public realm and confined to the home, where their lives were an endless round of domestic trivia, punctuated by those biologically determined activities of childbirth and child-rearing.13