WHY FEMINISM IS NOT A PICNIC

Today, of course, where German women may refuse to bear children,
German men may rely on import-quality Filipino wives to impair German women’s abortion rights.

This article is a rip-off from a pamphlet published by Rote Zora, probably a now disbanded armed group. The manifesto was signed ATS (for Arm the Spirit). Tumbang Preso is running it in the spirit of debate and discussion as it joins all those who try to grapple with questions related to women’s participation in liberation projects throughout time.


Throughout time, women have struggled in armed groups, but for the most part the reality of the contribution has been suppressed. The contribution of women in the guerilla has been so large that this mechanism no longer functions. The division of labor has also been undermined: women assume the responsibility for the infrastructure, men do the actions. Subversive women groups like Rote Zora are still few, but things are changing! We do not want only to carry out some actions, but also to describe the apparent reality of the ossified relationships we are forced to live with—even if we don’t find this easy.

The analyses of imperialism for the most part restrict their investigation to the political, economic, and military power structure of imperialism, neglecting to analyze the strategy as regards women both in the capitalist countries and in the Third World. For us it is not sufficient to say: On the basis of the analysis of imperialism, it is clear that NATO is the target for attacks and in as far as women attack NATO, the women’s struggle gains its pointed revolutionary direction. The liberation struggle remains, in this way, only as an attack against the central power structures, leaving aside the daily contents of violence, through which destruction, oppression, and exploitation are experienced.

For us it is also part of liberation if we set a small fire under the ass of a piggish landlord or his handyman, of the Atomic mafia, or the local warlord and his politician cronies. The problem we have with this is that we want to do more than we can in practice do, at this time.

However, that will also change! As well, the actions against the daily violence are already understandable, not only for the majority, but for all those who have not allowed their brains to be ripped off. In this way, attacks against the central State power have greater difficulty. They must be planned and thought through so that the political line is clear. Basically, we think that there are no “targets for attack” that can “overthrow” the State. The chance for a revolutionary movement lies much more in attacks against the unified, State-organized living conditions. The attacks against the central State institutions is only part of this. It is also illusionary—with all the revolutionary slogans in action—to seize upon a single target of attack. The organization of continuity in an armed group is more clearly the way to open a perspective of hope and victory.

Another point which we have reflected on is the women’s movement. We want to find out more clearly why the women’s movement has lost its revolutionary explosiveness and taken the path of the “new inwardness”. The one and only women’s movement doesn’t exist. There are many forms of women’s struggle, and in each individual one there are even more elements in motion, apart from the gender question, the class position, nationality, and the concrete situation.

Understanding sexism and racism as integral components of the patriarchal ruling system often remains in the stage of pious lip service. In the popular analyses of imperialism, sexism as a means for dividing and ruling is barely mentioned. If we now write about sexism and the gender-specific division of labor, it is not so as to say a word about us women, but on the basis of the knowledge that without concrete investigation about sexism, the condition in the Third World and in the metropoles, as well as in the Women’s Movement, cannot be understood. The oppression of women is older than capitalism. One of the roots of this lies in the function of her physiology. To have or not to have children isn’t understood as a conscious act—as an interaction with nature—and as such as work. This was not so for the activities of the breast and uterus of a woman. Marxist theory did not abolish this perspective about work. Accordingly, this perspective treats the so-called biological nature of women as a natural resource. They are thus exploited according to varied economic needs. In the Third World women are forcibly sterilized, in the metropoles they are made material promises to encourage them to have children. Abortion is described as mass murder. The economic element of the exploitation of women’s capacity to give birth is expanded through racism. In rich capitalist countries, the media whines about "sinking birth rates". In the US, the attacks against “welfare mothers” indicates that only white middle-class may perpetuate the race. This was so in Germany in the late 1980s when only superior races German women were encourage to bear children and women from Turkey, Spain, Greece, etc. were forbidden and sterilization recommended or even decreed. Today, of course, where German women may refuse to bear children, German men may rely on import-quality Filipino wives to impair German women’s abortion rights.

No wonder that up to this time, even the ruling class still haven’t gotten the answer, and whatever research had been undertaken in the area of test-tube babies and gene manipulation signals the attempt to snatch from women their sole disposal over the capacity to bear children. The exploitative, non-reciprocal relationship with nature, according to which first women, and later other classes and peoples, were made part of nature is characteristic of all male styles of production—in particular capitalism. This exploitative relationship to nature has brought us today to the edge of ecological catastrophe. On this basis, they developed the sexist and racist division of labor in which they consolidated production conditions in which cultivating sugar cane and rice isn’t work for whites and housework isn’t for men. This division of labor is no superstructural phenomenon. It is not based on false ideas and false thinking that the woman or man only must recognize, so as to change it; it is the economic basis of the extreme exploitation under capitalism. In all serious analyses of imperialism, we’ve read that in the Third World, backward pre-capitalist methods of production exist side by side with intense monopolization. On the one hand it is discovered that the concrete development, with growing capitalist development, doesn’t cause these “backwards” methods of production to disappear. In reality, the opposite occurs: they are and will be constantly reproduced. It is conspicuous that the problem of heterogeneity of methods of production are almost only examined in the Third World. In the metropoles, on the other hand, homogenous methods of production are accepted.

Those who see it from the other side wonder why the question of heterogeneity for the First World is not dealt with. Here, homogenous methods of production ostensibly rule. This assertion is not only Eurocentric and glorifying of capitalism. It is also sexist, because it covers up, in fact completely denies, that also at home labor power is extremely exploited, as such engaged at less than its reproduction cost. In fact half of all work hours – housework – is in general unpaid.

Who, then, are the non-capitalist producers?

They are the housewives of the entire world; the subsistence farmers of the Third World; male and female marginals, particularly in the Third World. It is they who produce surplus value. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote: It is clear that surplus value is neither produced by workers nor by capitalists, but by that social stratum that engage in non-capitalist production.

So for us, the following facts are clear: sexism and racism are not something of the mind, not a case of false consciousness, that clarification and good will alone will change. It is economic conditions that produce sexism and racism ever anew. They are above all necessary so that imperialism can function. That they, on the other hand, are political instruments that divide the oppressed doesn’t speak against this. Imperialism is the stage of capitalism in which “the rationality” of capitalist methods of production—using people so as to exploit their labor power—has validity for very many people in the Third World. The majority are squeezed dry, without any perspective for health or an acceptable lifespan. And if there are too many people, the strategy is annihilation. Barbarism is no vision of the future, we already find ourselves in it.

In the metropoles the conditions of violence are veiled. The economic violent force of capitalism has already established itself as acceptable violence in the heads of the people. The direct physical violent force, through the State with its organs of repression wins, but as such, makes the significance of social conflict apparent. It is clearly established that the extension of capitalism in the metropoles has not led to the replacement of direct forms of violence by something else, but has led directly to increased violence.

Women have been exposed to every level of violence, the indirect, structured forms of violence of this social system that ossify all possibilities of life, and the brutal, personal violent conditions at the hands of men. Open use of violence of men against women have become clear in their proportions in the last years as a result of the work of women’s shelters and emergency call lines. Women experience violence daily in different forms and qualities. The decisive factor of the structure of violence is the abuse of women in the family, rape, threats of rape, and the aesthetisization of violence against women in the media, advertising, and the cultural industry.

Violence against women, not as the exception but understood as a universal ruling principal, has led to the knowledge that the struggle against the personal experience of sexist violence cannot be separated from the struggle against every form of violence of the system. The increase in physical violence is a general social reality, along with the increasing senselessness of life and the anonymity of relationships, and women find themselves in the role of the social sacrifice. The covering up of this violence by the police and the justice system clarifies the embedding of the violent relationships between a man and his wife through marriage and the family in protecting this system is indicated by the increase of open violence. The contradiction between the claim of the full equality of women and the necessity of their clear oppression for the security of the ruling class is for this system an irreconcilable contradiction.

Women live in exile because the socially organized institutions, like the government, the economy, education, culture, the media, the church, the police, and the military are shaped and ruled by men. They are characterized by the principle of hierarchy, power, and power struggles. Therefore, men are also affected by power, violence, and oppression. They must subordinate themselves to these principles if the predominance of “male rule” is to be preserved. Our oppression is based on this. Women will always and above all be oppressed and confronted with violence either open or veiled in a patriarchal society.

Women must bow to this to avoid an open confrontation with power and violence, as long as this system exists—remaining in exile as a survival technique—but also remaining in a sacrificial posture. This sacrificial posture leads to an evasion of the responsibility for social conditions, therefore making them partially to blame. The fact that women experience violence is no excuse for passing on the violence to their children.

The internalization of this by women as the most effective form of securing power occurs through subtle forms of preventing the development of self-consciousness through education, morals, and love, to enforce the established norms and to enforce conformity. Power will certainly exert non-open forms so that without the use of open violence, women will take on and tolerate their social functions and will identify with them.

The women’s movement made the personal oppressive situation of women into the starting point of their political practice. The division between private and political practice was abolished. The personal was political and the political was made personal. Explosive revolutionary force lay in the consciousness of the direct connection between the abolition of personal suffering and the necessity of a social transformation. The idea of radical social change—much more revolutionary in the change of the consciousness of people than all previous revolutions—produces a deep power among women. New forms and contents can lead to the separation from the general left movement, to the organizational autonomy of the women’s movement. Autonomy introduced important processes, calling into question the value structures of male society, not looking for any perspective within the social power structure, not wanting to participate in influencing power, not defining women’s liberation through male roles. This can also lead them to construct liberated space to escape patriarchal structures. This is important, because no movement has as much to struggle for a separate identity from the oppressor as the women’s movement!

In the attacks against all oppressive structures lies the hope of not being integratable, and the hope of producing and developing the core of revolutionary subversion. On the basis of the overemphasis of subjective experience, which was the consequences of the taboos in the left groups, and the difficulty of converting the knowledge of personal oppression into direct acts of resistance, an “internalization” came out of the politics of subjectivity: personal change without social change. The route into this new “internalization” was favored by the class position of many of the women in the women’s movement. For women with good vocational training, there were and are real possibilities of finding a niche in this society and of seeking a little subjective happiness. The powerlessness with respect to social relationships wasn’t raised. This approach proved to be a deadend. The yearning for happiness was pursued without ever being achieved.

In the 1980s, in countries like West Germany, the resistance of the women’s movement developed almost exclusively to the point of confrontation with the individual man. Women set up self-defense groups, rape crisis lines, and, above all, women’s shelters. State repression was thoroughly analyzed and described. However, their behavior was hardly political. The coinciding of two experiences, violence as a daily attack and violence as a specifically directed oppression by the State, were not connected to each other. Abdicating the necessity of establishing the connection between capitalism and social oppression, abdicating the necessity of establishing who the enemy is, led as a result to the development of a tendency in the “self-help” projects (women’s shelters, crisis groups, women centers) to only soothing women in crisis. At the point when women limit themselves to remedying the distress of women without taking up and attacking the social causes when they let opposition to the State drop, the radicalism as regards the male gender of the police and defense forces is at an end. Negotiations with the cops and the justice apparatus to help a woman who has been attacked to imprison the rapist can’t replace the strength which is lacking and can only degenerate into complicity with the State. And clearly, at this point the massive State attempt at integration exhibits its effectiveness. The goal of this attempt at integration was and is to destroy the explosive revolutionary force of the women’s movement, to turn women into badly paid administrators of misery. In the Philippines and many countries where the feminism had been routed by counter-revolutionary forces, these self-help projects make a parody of the movement’s former strength as even the most “radical” and “gender-sensitive” male-led organizations institutionalize and propagate these parasitic women assistance programs.

A similar contradiction exists in the area of the women’s lesbian culture. The radicalism with which many lesbian women have broken with the male gender which expressed itself equally in a blossoming creativity in the area of theatre, music, literature and painting, which precipitated a new beginning for women’s culture, did not prevent it from becoming part of a State-tolerated subculture. Lesbian dreams are very radical dreams, but in the metropoles, they find a place: a privileged minority who had the will to engage in social bargaining. With the hope of setting all women free, they too have transformed the autonomous women’s project into an illusion of the achievement of personal happiness.

The autonomy of the women’s movement, organizationally and as regards content, as well as its external boundary, had to be established. There is no causal connection between autonomy and the external boundary. The autonomy of the movement can and must be developed, without reducing women’s politics to woman-specific problems. For self-organizing projects, provocation and not the avoidance of confrontation must be the goal: to break the social rules and not to be turned into a little functioning cog.

Women in the women’s organizations have expressed their unease about the political exile of the women’s and lesbian’s movement. Not many have broken through the ‘clones’ covering the women’s islands. What is clear is that the women’s project can’t do without the organization of subversiveness and counterviolence. The women’s movement has already written enough analyses about how women are educated to endure violence, but to not protect themselves. Women are trained to accept the powerlessness and psychological destruction which this system uses her emotionality to bring about. The sympathy of women for the oppressed is strongly developed but the hate for the oppressor, the enemy, is not developed, even suppressed. Hate has something to do with destruction and destruction scares women. To stop at describing these conditions means nothing other than to accept the condition of powerlessness, to accept the role this society offers women. They myth of peace-loving women is the legitimation for remaining in the condition of sacrifice.

But every woman who has ever thrown a stone, who didn’t retreat after being struck by a man, but attacked back, can comprehend the feeling of freedom women terrorist groups had experienced when they destroyed sex shops or set off bombs. In our society, freedom has something to do with destruction, destruction of the structures that want to chain us to women’s roles. And these structures can only be destroyed if we attack the conditions that attempt to destroy us. Attacking in the most diverse forms but always in connection with our unreconciliable hate for the society. The armed form of attacks is for us an unavoidable part of the women’s struggle. This position, as we have outlined, is barely developed in the women’s movement. Therefore, we have organized together with men in the guerilla. But here the contradiction between the struggle against sexism and class struggle can’t be resolved either. Our status as an autonomous women’s group has to be determined on the basis of the current political situation of women which at the moment is at its knees. Ours should not be a supplementary form of struggle with which organizations can decorate themselves. We are not the solution to the fundamental problems, only one way. Our feminist way bases itself on the perspectives of the women’s movement and the international revolutionary struggles and not only on our perspective.


Arm the Spirit, 2009