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Title: On Feminism
Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno
Date: 1977
Language: en
Topics: feminism, anarcha-feminism
Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-15 from https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-on-feminism
Notes: Original title: Sul femminismo in Movimento e Progetto Rivoluzionario, Edizioni di “Anarchismo” Catania 1977. Translated by Jean Weir.

Alfredo M. Bonanno

On Feminism

An anarchist who based her revolutionary intervention in social

struggles precisely on her being a woman was Emma Goldman, and a clear

testimony to this is to be found in her writings.

The obstacles encountered by Emma in her thirty years of anarchist

propaganda as well as the polemics she maintained still exist in the

revolutionary movement today, and concern no small part of the struggles

for women’s liberation.

When Emma clashed with the quite evident male chauvinism of well-known

anarchists who had often spent their whole lives in the struggle for the

social revolution, and argued with men like Most or Kropotkin, she did

so first of all as a woman, refusing the marginal role that these men

were imposing on her, almost unconsciously. When she brought the sexual

question to the fore, pointing out the discrimination that woman is

subjected to and the resulting social consequences very clearly, she

often caused a scandal and raised suspicion within the revolutionary

organisations themselves. And when, in 1900, at the international

anarchist conference in Paris, they ‘suggested’ that she not take up the

sexual question so as not ‘to make a bad impression’ on the press

present, she got up and left.

This situation still largely persists, or rather, with the sharpening of

the thematics and deepening of analyses it has become more acute,

radicalising in incommunicable positions in a fictitious clash between

male and female comrades, leading to a great deal of incomprehension.

Before going into the question more specifically, it is important to

clarify something. The liberation of woman, therefore feminism, cannot

cohabit easily with revolutionary mythologies of the authoritarian kind

(and now we will see why); when this cohabitation exists, it is nearly

always due to an instrumental compromise. Being disposed to

confrontation over the past few years, the feminist movement has found

itself surrounded by instruments from the marxist analysis and has used

them. It was not deemed the right moment, also to avoid having too many

irons in the fire, to go into the fact that these instruments came from

an authoritarian perspective of revolutionary intervention, as they

preferred to proceed first for the construction of a structure of

intervention, putting off theoretical clarification till later. When

some patron saint was attacked, as happened with Hegel, it was done in

an attempt to ‘save the situation’, as clearly happened with the

‘reading’ of the marxist classics which, after all, were all written (or

nearly all) by men, including the Luxemburg who was a woman, but

reasoned like a man.

Basically, it seems to us that the revolution women are struggling for

cannot be reached through an authoritarian perspective, in the sense of

women being in command of the future power ‘elite’ (guiding party of the

proletariat) instead of men. To think like this would be to simply

repeat the errors of the struggle for emancipation carried out by women

in the past that led them to enter professions that had previously been

reserved for men, as well as leading them into Parliament and voting;

but it did not take them one inch along the road to freedom and the

feminist revolution. Not just that. Starting off handicapped by

centuries and centuries of ‘gynaeceum’, they had to make superhuman

efforts to make themselves equal with the ‘privileged’ male subjects,

only to end up contributing to the production of capitalist wealth.

One could object to all this with the discourse of the progressive

evolution of the struggles, the maturation of the exploited masses and

so on, but that would not change the basic problem: the feminist

revolution cannot be built on the authoritarian model, it must set

itself out in a qualitatively different way, attacking the centres of

male power, not in order to substitute them with another (female) one,

but eliminating them completely. In this perspective it seems to us that

the feminist revolution and the anarchist revolution must coincide.

The final aim, however, cannot subtract women (and anarchists) from

involvement in the partial structure, a proper analysis of this

structure and intervention in the revolutionary sense.

In the first place, escaping from the illusion of quantity. In fact,

what were the contrasts between Goldman and Kropotkin or Most, and what

are the disagreements between many female and male comrades today?

Precisely in the one or the others’ claim to count themselves, to

measure their capacity of intervention through the number of militants,

according to the party schema. Basically, Most had the German-speaking

anarchist movement in the United States in his hands. He knew that many

German comrades, both due to their religious roots as well as the

duality in men who find it difficult to avoid an evaluation of women

based on sex, did not like female comrades (who are women after all) to

get involved in certain questions (a residual of hypocritical

respectability). Hence the contrast with Goldman and his concern that

she might ‘discredit’ the movement, i.e. might cause the number of

members to decrease.

Whoever enters the quantitative logic is struggling in a revolutionary

perspective, but with inadequate means. Whoever is constantly measuring,

ends up fixing an objective line of approach that they are not prepared

to question. Their point of reference is the movement of the exploited

in general, with the ideas that it possesses at a given time. Now, as

far as the problem of woman is concerned, there is no doubt that the

movement of the exploited as a whole has quite retrograde ideas on the

subject (woman as sex object, as domestic angel, at best as companion at

work). Consequently, whoever decides to enter the quantitative logic

takes it upon themselves to influence these ideas with political

propaganda and action, but, at the same time cannot keep a check on it,

so cannot fail to ‘suggest’ to the (woman) comrade to ‘re-enter the

ranks’). Anarchists are no different from Marxists in this aspect. Even

the female comrades who enter the quantitative logic (building the

movement) cannot act otherwise (if they really want to build something).

So, it seems to us that a good part of the efforts of the feminist

movement is quite rightly aimed at repelling the chauvinistic pulsions

of male comrades. It should also be aimed at analyzing the objectives of

the movement and its structures, however, in order to avoid falling into

the contradiction of ‘make room for me’.

Then there is the other side of the question. If the feminist revolution

cannot fail to be anarchist, it follows that the methodology of

intervention cannot fail to be similar, if not the same. And how do

anarchists see themselves concerning the mass? And how do women place

themselves concerning the same problem?

Anarchists do not present themselves as holders of the truth, as a

guide, or as revolutionary memory. In fact, they do not even place

themselves ‘before the masses’, they belong to the mass. When they give

significance to some organisation of theirs, they do it in order to

‘deepen’ the revolutionary event because they are forced to approach the

revolution gradually, they have a strategic need for the struggle

against power. They must not fall into the quantitative equivocation. It

is not big anarchist movements that determine liberatory-revolutionary

events. A great number of conditions give rise to the revolutionary

event, anarchists are just one component, the one that immediately

addresses itself towards the liberatory deed, which could be cast aside

and killed by an interested minority.

The same could be said for women. If they stand before the mass as

simply women, they cannot but discriminate between two distinct groups

of a different sex within the mass. In this way ‘all women’ come to have

a revolutionary potential, which remains to be seen. In the same way,

all workers become part of an hypothetical revolutionary potential, even

policemen, judges, politicians, mafiosi. Of course, starting from a

quantitative logic this solution is very convenient, makes the woman

feel strong, makes her part of a ‘great mass of sisters’, but it

certainly doesn’t take her towards liberation. Not only, but starting

solely from the condition of being a woman, this condition becomes

linked with the concept of ‘truth’ and the woman becomes carrier of

truth, which the other half of the mass (the males) must be made to

understand, by any means possible.

On the other hand, if the woman sees herself as an anti-authoritarian

revolutionary, renounces the perspective of taking over anything in

order to crush the other sex, perhaps even more than she herself has

been crushed until now, but puts all her involvement in the liberatory

revolutionary event, inserting herself within organisational structures

which, starting from the feminist matrix, make it possible to valorise

thematics and motivations that put the problem of woman in first place.

Then it will no longer be a question of dividing the world into two

large slices, but of showing it to be divided as it is by capitalist

exploitation, always denouncing this division more and more,

exasperating it, until the day of the final liberation and abolition of

every division, including that based on sexual differences.

That said, we are not suggesting that women should ‘soften’ the violent

charge exploding within them as they become aware of the double

exploitation they suffer, in order to enter the ‘revolutionary movement’

‘purified’. Unfortunately, even between comrades struggling for

revolution, who are making efforts in the direction of liberation, but

who precisely for this are not ‘freed’, residuals of prejudice and

discrimination remain that are not easily eradicated. The woman feels

all that and sharpens her struggle. But this situation is a consequence

of capitalist exploitation that restricts woman within a precise ghetto

of exploitation: the ghetto of social discrimination. Woman comes to be

valued as a sex object. Whatever she does, no matter what activity she

carries out, in whatever field she involves herself, her sex or rather

that which men think her sex to be, arrives before her. This cannot fail

to wound the woman and lead her to the conscience that if she wants to

reach the feminist revolution, she must, before anything else, knock

this barrier down. But the knocking down of this barrier cannot happen

without the contemporaneous knocking down of other barriers.The woman

will always be considered a sex object so long as a world divided into

classes exists, because by reducing her to an object she is enclosed

within the ghetto, with that same process of criminalisation that comes

to be adopted with the other dangerous minorities: prisoners, the

alienated, etc.

And the great charge of revolutionary violence comes from her

consciousness of feeling herself closed within the ghetto. With a not

dissimilar process, prisoners today are gaining consciousness of their

situation as ghettoised and are exploding in revolts that are contained

with more and more difficulty. Also here we are coming up against not

easily avoidable dangers. One runs the risk of emphasizing the

‘prisoner’ only because he is an human being restricted inside four

walls. This, it seems to us, the first moment of growth of the movement,

the moment in which, precisely, the movement objectifies itself and does

it with the most macroscopic means it has at disposition: in the case of

prison, prison as a building, as total institution; in the case of the

woman, sex, as a net discriminant between two different worlds, that of

the man (dominator) and the woman (dominated).

But then the movement grows. It leaves the period of infancy in which it

was recognisable through the most immediate characteristic, and develops

its own revolutionary depth. In the same way prisoners realise that the

struggle against the total institution can only have outlets if it links

itself to that other total institution, the society of exploitation, and

that the persistence of the latter will always and continually prevent

the destruction of the first. And realising that developing a class

analysis, they individuate enemies and separate them from the allies,

they organise as a revolutionary minority, choose objectives and the

means for reaching them. Only then are they really dangerous for power,

and only then does the repression become ferocious, because it is no

longer possible to draw them into the trap of reduced sentences, bail,

amnesty, prison reform; transformisms of a power that means, in this

way, to transfer the ghettoised from one ghetto (a smaller one) into

another (bigger one).

And the feminist movement is also growing, putting aside its

discriminant on the basis of sex where all its efforts were addressed at

the beginning. The struggle against the other sex only has reason to be

when inserted within the struggle against the boss, against the

institution that defends the boss, against the mechanism he has created

to perpetuate exploitation. In this wider perspective, the feminist

struggle also becomes fundamental, forcing everybody to become aware of

a problem that (for the privileged) appears to be secondary. Only when

this link is made will the feminist movement appear in all its

dangerousness for power; and that is because, during that phase it will

not demand anything specific ‘for women’, but will demand it for all the

exploited: a totally revolutionary demand, that only those who have

undergone the worst of all exploitation can make. And against the rage

of women, it will not be easy for power to find an accommodating

solution.