[progchat_action] Venezuela: Is our socialism 'feminist'?
 
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2007 09:12:59 -0500 (CDT)

Socialist Outlook : SO/12 - Summer 2007

Venezuela; Is our socialism 'feminist'?

Jessie Blanco

Venezuelan socialist feminist Jessie Blanco asks searching questions about
Chavez's 'Socialism of the 21st century'.

The debate led by our President that has recently opened in our country,
propelled by the changes at the level of discourse and in reality, concerns
the social system - 21st Century Socialism - that is taking shape in
Venezuela. [1] This rising system already shows signs, if we do not do
something about it, that are very similar to those exhibited by the old
socialisms that perished more from internal than external causes, through
insidious practices that originated in the imperialist colossus.

For feminists of the anti-capitalist left, the basic contradiction in
supporting the president, in the proposed process of revolution that he
represents and leads, arises from the need to differentiate ourselves, in
the first place from patriarchal practice and the logic of domination which
this implies, deriving its strength from the power centred in a single
person - all the more so if this is a masculine figure, who represents the
androcentric and heteronormative world [2] which so many of us have fought.

This is not to say that one's sex is the guarantee of a feminist
consciousness and that it is enough to have a woman in power for our
struggles to be supported, because we already have more than enough examples
of exactly the opposite. But we should be clear that the person who presides
over the Bolivarian revolution of Venezuela, is not, strictly speaking, a
feminist. Even if he were a feminist, with all his power and will to change,
this would not be a sufficient basis for him on his own to transform a
cultural and symbolic system that dominates even our own unconscious.

This leads to the question of autonomy and the need to advance our own
agendas for the society we want, based on our needs, on our individual and
collective struggles. In Venezuela, although an organic women's movement
does not exist, nonetheless women's struggles have taken place and continue
to do so. Whether through ignorance or denial, some do not consider this to
be an historic current. Venezuelan women fighters achieved victories for the
most part within the framework of a feminism of equality, riding the waves
of international feminism. This struggle bore fruit in the constitutional
process of 1999, which gave us visibility in the constitution: for example,
the obligation to use non-sexist language, in spite of the laughter and the
annoyance that it provokes, or the advance that is signified by Article 88,
which considers domestic work as economic activity that creates added value
and produces wealth and social welfare, vindicating [3] the right of
housewives to social security, among other things.

Nevertheless, in the course of the history of Venezuela, women of different
political groupings were united in concrete and conjunctural fights against
a common enemy, as in the case of the fight against the dictatorships of
Gsmez and Pirez Jiminez [4] and, in the case of democratic governments,
struggles related to women's own agendas (the right to vote, divorce, the
decriminalization of abortion, etc.). So, Venezuelan feminism is a child of
the left, though a single left does not exist, and, as history has unfolded,
different sections of the left have become more radical, while others have
preserved old dogmas and others have perhaps moved to the right. The
political map of Venezuelan feminism today is traversed by the political
polarization which is evidenced within the present government, but
peculiarly not by internal divisions as far as women's own agenda of
struggle is concerned - no, by divisions around the question of the Leader.

The problem of 'the leader' In this sense, feminist agendas have also been
bound up with the figure and the undeniable leadership of President Chavez,
as has also possibly been the case with other currents of struggle in the
popular movements. Examples of the co-opting of women's struggles via the
power of the Leader include the first march of women in our country for
about fifty years. This march, against imperialism and war, took place on 8
March 2006, International Womens' Day, and was directed towards the US
embassy. It was promoted by the president in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan
[5] and organised by INAMUJER, the organization which carries out his
policies for women. Despite being an historical achievement, bringing
together so many women in one mobilization, this march paradoxically came
about through a call by the President in support of an agenda which,
although shared by us, was not agreed as our priority. Thus women's capacity
for mobilization has sometimes been a response to other concerns not
necessarily arising from our own struggles, let alone our own agendas.

In addition, there is an idealisation of the leader, which was reinforced by
Maria de Leon, president of the National Institute of Women, and revealed in
the interview with Edith Franco in Rebelisn on 3 September 2005 entitled
'The socialism of the 21st century is communism'. [6] In it she emphasises
her appreciation that, 'Above the leadership of our president there is
nothing, only God, and God is with Chavez.... Uniting women is an exclusive
task of President Hugo Chavez... .he is the one who leads .. and if our
president decides on the union of those movements of women, they must be
united, raise themselves up and converge in a single organization.' The idea
that 'Only Chavez can save the women, just as only he can save the people',
is an assessment that caused much annoyance and uneasiness among feminists,
not only those in the opposition but also those in the communist current.
Not only does it sweep aside the proposals of the most libertarian
socialism - which took shape in the Paris Commune, from where the phrase,
'only the people can save the people', derives - but because for the
feminist struggle it is a backward step to put the leadership of our fight
into the hands of a caudillo, [7] losing our autonomy and undervaluing our
own capacity and the historical achievements of women. To make a god of
Father Chavez is once again to render invisible the role of women.

If we, as women, do not discuss the kind of society we want, beyond what
Chavez, Evo, Fidel among OTHERS, want, we will continue to run the risk that
they will steal our ideas, our words and our dreams from us, and we will
continue being the proletarians or the workers who belong to the dreams,
realized or not, of others.

Lessons of history If we delve a little into the history of that
paradigmatic historical model of Socialism, the Russian Revolution of 1917,
we could learn much from it, as long as we read it objectively and
critically. We could then see what dangers threaten not only the
revolutionary processes, but our own role and place as female citizens and
as the subjects of rights, within these.

In her book Bread And Roses, [8] Andrea D'Atri describes the gains that
women made at the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1917, before it was
kidnapped by the Stalinist bureaucracy after the death of Lenin. These gains
included the right to vote, to divorce, to abortion, the elimination of the
power of the husband, legal equality between marriage and co-habitation.
Above all, beyond the new laws (and the struggles for equality) the
possibility of laying the foundations for real access by women to the
cultural and economic domains, including domestic tasks (the issue that
usually represents the glass ceiling for any revolution that does not
penetrate into the home and the so-called private realm). According to both
male and female revolutionaries, domestic chores, carried out by women in an
individual and isolated way in their homes, had to be replaced by a system
of social services guaranteed by the socialist State: day care centres,
kindergartens, laundries, collective canteens, hospitals, but also cinemas
and theatres. This meant, in the words of Trotsky (1938), quoted by D'Atri,
'the complete absorption of the economic functions of the family by
socialist society'. [9]

>From 1926 onward, under the despotic regime of Stalin, civil marriage was
again instituted as the only legal union. Later the right to abortion was
abolished and homosexuality and prostitution were considered crimes. In
contrast, motherhood was glorified: the title of 'Heroic mother' was given
to those women who had more than ten children. There was a clear rolling
back of the gains that had been achieved through the struggles of socialist
women - which, by the way, did not differ much in their agendas from
present-day women's struggles, more than half a century later. These
conquests by women at the beginning of the Russian Revolution were later
threatened by Stalinism - and not only by the bureaucracy but through the
conception of the roles of women and the family as mainstays of social order
and control - this was one of the obstacles to the progress of communist
feminists.

This brief historical survey exposes the possible obstacles that we women
may have to overcome regarding our participation within a future socialism,
both our agenda and the contribution that we must generate.

Feminist struggle and the Party Maria de Leon in her interview discusses the
need to unify the women's movement, but sees it composed only of those
groupings of women from the political parties. These are the Manuelita Saenz
Movement of the PPT, the Clara Zetkin Organisation of the Venezuelan
Communist Party and the Bolivarian Women's Force of the MVR. [10] The
overall responsibility and the task of unifying is given to the President of
the Republic through the union of these parties and later of the 'women's
movement' allied to the parties.

This is a significant point for our debate about socialism and feminism. We
need to ask: what has been the traditional participation of women in parties
throughout history? Has this participation meant an advance towards the
conquest of our rights? What has been the cost of this form of political
exercise? Which women are able to participate in these parties and what
place do they occupy? How do class and gender divisions affect this
participation? What is the historical balance sheet that we make in our
initial political participation in the discussion about autonomy and the
delegation of power? Where does this leave our autonomy?

Delegation of Power versus Female Empowerment Feminist socialism cannot
become a reality without subjects who give practical shape to this
historical possibility. As feminists or as female Venezuelan fighters for
socialism, we are ourselves governed by the contradiction inherent in
fighting the battle against all forms of oppression and discrimination, both
of gender and of social class, against patriarchy and against capitalism. In
the fight against the latter we are accompanied by male comrades in
struggle, but in the fight against patriarchy we still find ourselves very
isolated. For that reason we have a great historical task: to conceive and
give birth to a socialism that is not only anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist but also, above all, anti-patriarchal. Already many
communist feminists have learned the lesson from 'actually existing
socialism' - that to overthrow the capitalist system, or to transform it
into a socialist one, was not sufficient to change the relations of
domination between the sexes and challenge discrimination towards women.
Unless the cultural model of androcentric domination, which serves also as a
support to capitalism, is not questioned and undermined at all levels, we
cannot achieve our liberation. If we do not understand this historical
legacy we run the risk of reproducing it, so that what happened to socialism
in the 20th century could occur again in the 21st century.

Some feminists think it necessary to occupy spaces in the parties and in the
structures of the different public agencies to shape our politics; other,
so-called radical feminists, emphasise the need for a political practice and
militant activism that is autonomous and based in the movements, as distinct
from the logic of parties.

I consider that autonomy is a strategic and fundamental engine for the
process of women's empowerment, for the struggles of the popular movements
and not only those of women - but this is not the easiest or the quickest
road. This does not leave out the contributions of feminists to equality,
which have yielded a rich harvest in our country in the area of human
rights.

If we take it as read that the women's movement lies solely inside the
political parties, that women should continue to make the politics of men,
in the service of men, and repeatedly delay their own fight, then it is not
very difficult to anticipate the result; nor is necessary to be
prophetesses - which we are - to realize that this will lead directly to the
failure at least of our socialism.

I believe our road passes through the idea of the conception, the debate,
the process of knowledge production that transforms our reality. I do not
believe that while we delegate our power - whether to the party, to the
leader, or to the husband - and do not take a step forward in the search for
and the conquest of our autonomy, we will be able to find ourselves again as
immanent political subjects, equal to men, as sisterly as they are
fraternal, but above all as different as we are. Rather this will happen
through reinventing the forms of political action, through discovering new
paths, pregnant with political lessons and with creative militancy, so that
we do not risk the world becoming flat, as Sub-Comandante Marcos [11] says,
or, in this case, so that socialism does not become flat.

We, as women, respond: What solutions would the socialism of the 21st
century provide for the cooks of the popular canteens, who previously cooked
for their children on their own, and now have 'the revolutionary' task to
cook for all the community in exchange for a bigger pot, food guaranteed for
her and her children and pay below the minimum wage?

What would this 'new socialism' offer to the mothers of the barrios, to the
secretaries of the parties, to the lesbians, transsexuals and transgendered
people of the barrios and to the female sex workers?

What kind of socialism do left-wing women want who are not only
anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist but anti-patriarchal, so that the
security of the housewife, approved in the 1999 constitution, becomes flesh
and blood and not just something on paper?

What solution will the socialism of the 21st century give to the groups of
diverse sexuality so that their multiple gender identities are recognized
and they share equally the same rights and duties as heterosexuals?

What would the socialism of the 21st century propose to the real live
Barbies they want to turn our daughters into, to the world of 'without tits
there is no paradise' and to the transnational structures of discrimination?

How would the socialism of the 21st century respond to the sexual division
of labour inside and outside the home, to the needs of poor women, so that
they do not die through lack of medical attention when deciding to end their
pregnancy? What would it say to the merchants of female impotence who
monopolize illegal abortions and who gain more money the more prohibited it
is?

So, women comrades, what kind of society do we want? Will it perhaps be a
society in which we continue organizing the communal councils so that the
leader of the council, or the best speaker, or the most enlightened one,
manages the resources and imposes his agenda?

Will it perhaps be a society in which we continue, on our own, to take care
of our sons and daughters and those of the community, and remain prisoners
of this perverse matricentrism?

Will it perhaps be one in which we cannot access education, not because
educational centres do not exist, but because we are occupied in the
quintuple day (mother, wife, housewife, militant, etc.)?

Will it be a socialism only as Marx painted it, or will we learn to read the
critical questions that were well put in their time by Rosa Luxemburg, faced
with reformism, and by Clara Zetkin, who captured the attention of her male
colleagues with forceful arguments for the emancipation of women, and
pronounced herself in favour of the right of the women to work and to
participate in national and international affairs, as well as for the
protection of mothers and childhood?

Let us speak out!

Bibliographic References

D'ATRI, Andrea, (2004) 'Pan y Rosas: pertenencia de ginero y antagonismo de
clase en el capitalismo'. Ediciones Las Armas de la Crmtica, Buenos Aires

LEON, Maria, (2005) 'El socialismo del siglo XXI es el comunismo',
www.rebelisn.org

ESPINA, Gioconda, (2007) 'El socialismo del siglo XX no ocurris, son cosas
suyas'. Article sent to the women's list administered by G. Espina y G.
Parentelli, 13 February 2007

CAROSIO, Alba, 'Feminismo en el socialismo del siglo XXI', www.rebelisn.org.

Originally published in MATEA magazine. Reproduced by www.aporrea.org, 22
February 2007, translated by Andrew Kennedy.

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Jessie Blanco is a Venezuelan socialist feminist.

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NOTES

[1] This text is dedicated to the women proletarians of the Venezuelan
revolution who do not know what the slogan "socialism of the 21st century"
is all about but who defend it, homeland or death.

[2] By androcentric we mean the dominant cultural system that is centred
exclusively on man as universal referent of the human. And by
heteronormative we mean the ideological and cultural system based on
heterosexuality as the obligatory norm in the sex/gender system that
therefore excludes different gender identities (LGBTT: lesbians, gays,
bisexuals, transsexuals and transgenders, amongst others).

[3] We say 'vindicating' because it is not possible to defend what she has
not even vindicated herself: remember the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who
was the first to coin the term.

[4] Gsmez was President on three occasions: 1908-14, 1922-9 and 1931-5.
Pirez Jiminez was President from 1952 to 1958 [AK].

[5] Cindy Sheehan is the mother of an American soldier who died in Iraq; she
has dedicated herself to activism against war and especially against the
warmongering of US President George Bush.

[6] Interview with Maria de Leon by Lolita: 'El socialismo del siglo XXI es
el comunismo' at www.jovenvanguardia.org.

[7] The term used in Latin America to describe a political strongman,
usually from the military [AK].

[8] Andrea D'Atri, (2004) Pan y Rosas.

[9] D'Atri, (2004) p89.

[10] PPT: Country for All; MVR: Movement for the Fifth Republic, the party
most identified with Chavez until the founding of PSUV, the United
Venezuelan Socialist Party [AK].

[11] Best known spokesperson of the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation
Army, Mexico [AK].

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