20+Pages+of+Teresa+Ebert+made+easy+for+the+CU,+Tweedie

=Twenty Pages of Teresa Ebert made easy for the Communist University.=


 * By Dominic Tweedie**

Can we possibly deal with such a work?
The Communist University has met ten times already in 2006. All of the sessions have had something to do with women in revolution.

The eleventh text is "**(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism**" by Teresa Ebert. We have had two weeks to read it instead of one – but is it still too difficult? Is it reasonable for people whose first language is mostly not English and who mostly don’t have tertiary education, to be trying to get to grips with something like this?

Even the title is awkward; and the author uses unusual words in her own personal way, from the first line onwards. This piece of writing is typically “academic” in the worst sense of the word. It makes no attempt at clarity for people who are not academics (i.e. most of us).

But in spite of all this there are very good reasons why the Communist University should use such a text.

The **first** is that if we do not, we leave a part of feminist literature outside our scope. Not just Ebert’s work but also that of her opponents, Judith Butler and Donna Hathaway, and many others will escape from our examination. The trouble with letting them do so is that these intellectuals are actually, for better or for worse, the main leaders of feminist debate in our time. We shall have been kept off the summit, left looking up into clouds of obscurity.

I believe that we can quite easily go to that summit, and that we should do so. What is there is not really so special, or so difficult.


 * Secondly**, we should remember that in no case at the Communist University are we trying to “learn” a text, or cover all its possible aspects. The text is there to generate dialogue.

By the way, if the chair should try to use his power to cut the dialogue short and to redirect it, on the grounds that the group should be trying to touch aspects of the topic that he has noticed and we have not, then he is in the wrong. This is particularly the case when the text is a “difficult” one.

In the Communist University we are primarily learning how to learn – collectively and socially. That includes especially learning how to explore the highest reaches of literature together, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the stimulus it can give to our shared understanding – an understanding that for practical reasons needs to exist between us, and not outside our ranks. Only when it is our common property will it be useful to the vanguard of the working class, and to the class itself. For this purpose even the most obscure text can serve as well as the simplest. This is the transcendent secret of Freirean pedagogy, and we need to test it and prove it from time to time.


 * Thirdly**, this text of Ebert’s happens to be right on-topic when it comes to feminism’s crisis in our day, and the relation of feminism’s crisis to the general philosophical crisis of our time. Ebert is a supporter of historical materialism as against what she chooses to call “ludic” feminism. Ludic means playful. Ebert’s accusation is that the main feminists these days have fallen to the level of playing mind games. In this respect, they are no different from, and are actually following behind ("tailing"), the anti-communist “post-modernist” philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and especially Michel Foucault.

These men and their fellow post-modernists (alternatively “post-structuralists” or post-humanists) have often got away with philosophical murder through deliberate obscurity. We as their opponents, because theirs is the ideology of Imperialism in our time, must not hand them a victory just because of their evasion and their sophistry.

In our next session we take the work of another materialist and rationalist and opponent of post-modernism, Meera Nanda. In **//Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science'//** she succeeds not only in locating bourgeois feminism in its true (subordinate) relation to post-modernism, but also shows how this plays out in post-liberation politics in India, and by inference, in South Africa. Therefore, if we follow Nanda, we will have arrived at a synthesis of all our studies for the moment. Ebert’s writing is a step towards Nanda’s broader vision. Nanda is also a lot clearer as a writer.

As usual, we pass through a thicket and into the open. We hope at that stage to see clearly the close relation between post-modernism, bourgeois feminism, mystical nationalism, obscurantist religion, and monopoly-finance capitalist Imperialism – so that we can better fight against all these pathologies. All of them are viciously present in South Africa today, supporting each other, and opposing the interest of the working class, which is on the contrary historical, rational, humanist, and materialist.

All right – so how do we actually deal with such a text as Ebert’s?
Remember the “Buzan Organic Study Method” (see “**//A conspectus of ‘Use Your Head//**’, about half-way down). In this case, seeing that the document is twenty pages long, divided into six parts, and the last part (the conclusion) is only four paragraphs, the obvious thing to do is to sample those four paragraphs at the end, first.

Surprise, surprise! Here we find a quotation from Karl Marx, as long ago as 1845, from the “German Ideology”, in the Preface of which Marx wrote: “The phantoms of (men’s) brains have got out of their hands”.

This is what Teresa Ebert says and quotes in the conclusion of her 20 pages:

‘Thus what is at stake in this displacement of the economic by discourse is the elision of issues of exploitation and the substitution of a discursive identity politics for the struggle for full social and economic emancipation. Marx and Engels' critique of the radical "Young Hegelians" applies equally to ludic cultural materialists:

‘“they are only fighting against 'phrases.' They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world”. (//The German Ideology//)’

From her first words (“Historical materialism haunts feminism.”) Teresa Ebert in this essay is “haunting” and fighting back against the tide of irrationality. The same irrationality existed in Marx’s day, and Marx fought it (with the same ironic reversal: “A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism”). It existed before that in the 18th century (e.g. Berkeley) and among the Ancient Greeks in the work of Plato.

Her final two sentences sum it all up, not too clumsily, as follows:

“For historical materialist feminists, however, cultural and ideological practices are not autonomous but are instead primary sites for reproducing the meanings and subjectivities supporting the unequal gender, sexual and race divisions of labour, and thus a main arena for the struggle against economic exploitation as well as cultural oppression. The untimely time of red feminism has come.”

This is enough. Understanding, it, we understand what the essay is about.

So why does it need to be 20 pages long?
Paging through Ebert’s essay – backwards, naturally – allows the reader to understand that what she is doing is arguing systematically with the leading individual writers of her time (1995) and the years preceding it (Michel Foucault, for example died – of AIDS – in 1984).

A good example of how Ebert opposes the ideas of her opponents (in this case Foucault) with those of Marx and his successors is found in the bottom half of page 12:

“What one does find //(in the Marxist conception of power)// — and what Foucault's entire theory of power is an attempt to displace — is, as Foucault describes it: "an economic functionality of power ... power is conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations of production and of a class domination which the development and specific forms of the forces of production have rendered possible" (88-89). In opposition to a Marxist theory of power — which always insists on the //dialectical// relations of power and the economic — Foucault (the former student of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser) develops an unrelentingly anti-historical-materialist theory of power. He severs power from its material connection to the social relations and contradictions of production, and reduces it to an abstract force confined to the superstructure. His is an anti-dialectical theory that substitutes an analytics of localised, reversible domination for a theory of systematic global exploitation. This ludic displacement of historical materialism has made Foucault one of the main articulators of post-Marxism in late capitalism and given him an extraordinary influence among academics, professionals and other middle and upper class knowledge-workers, especially in the West.”

Later on, on page 15, Ebert says that the bourgeois feminist philosopher Judith Butler “like Foucault, makes power, itself, the //constitutive// "base" of society and all social processes, substituting it for the Marxist concept of a //determining// economic base” and that Butler goes even further, so that finally, for her, “Not only is power everywhere and nowhere, but power is everything and nothing.”

Historical and dialectical humanist materialism is abandoned by Foucault in favour of a schematic set of “power relations”. In Butler’s work this phantom of power relations gets completely out of hand, and becomes nothing at all – basically nihilism.


 * //James Heartfield wrote about Judith Butler in 2002//** as follows:

“In Butler’s telling the terrible burden of subjectivity seems more or less established until she checks herself to ask ‘how can it be that the subject, taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the same time the effect of subordination, understood as the deprivation of agency?’” Heartfield answers: “How indeed?”

Further on in this short extract archived on the Communist University web site Heartfield concludes:

“At this point one has to wonder whether Butler is carried away with her own dialectical skills. What began as a criticism of the monopoly over freedom exercised by men has turned, paradoxically, into a criticism of freedom as such.”

Post-modernism, and post-modernist feminism even more so, is precisely a “criticism of freedom as such”. In the age of Imperialism, it is the preferred ideological servant of Imperialist monopoly finance capital. Imperialism increasingly denies us freedom in practice, while its philosophers deny even the possibility of freedom.

What about pages 1 to 11 of Ebert’s essay? Well, they are very interesting as a tour of the prevailing philosophies of the 1990s. In the process Ebert unpacks and dismisses the false “materialist feminism” offered by some of her contemporaries as a sort of liberal’s dream: “Marxism without Marx”.

A good way is to sample spots of such a text here and there.

Mostly, it should be valuable as a demonstration of the continuous conflict within philosophy, leading up to confrontation in the early 2000s between resurgent rational humanism (e.g. Heartfield, 2002; Nanda, 2004) on the one hand, and an exhausted post-modernism/feminism on the other.

In the work of Vandana Shiva and others, feminism abandons philosophy altogether and retreats into irrational mystical spiritualism, where it finds itself in close company with irrational religious nationalists who are in practice no different from fascists. Meera Nanda holds the line for reason, progress, and class struggle.

The Communist University is a conscious and deliberate part of this Marxist anti-Imperialist resurgence.

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