The heated discussions of the problems raised or intimated in Selma James's pamphiet and the solutions criticised in the o other pamphlet, which is only one of the more fully laid out of the critiques and alternatives that have arisen out of six months of a debate carried on throughout the women's movement, indicate the emergence of a new stage in the development of the movement.
CENTRAL QUESTIONS Previously, discussion within the movement has been a process of turning angry, intuitive awareness of oppression into an understanding of its causes and the ways in which it operates, and into a consciousness of its effects on the oppressed. Problems at the centre of discussion have been concerned with seeing the way in which events, images, injustices, stresses, etc., previously experienced as fragmented and unrelated take on a pattern as different manifestations of a systematic oppression justified by a sexist culture and with how one rids oneself of the psychology that has adapted to oppression. These the mes of course continue, but the central questions posed are now strategic. How we destroy the institutions of sexist oppression. What is the strategic justification for an autonomous womens movement i.e. beyond the justification in terms of the necessity of collectively analysing the experiences of oppression and rejecting ideological definitions of women's situation? What is the specific social power of women? Is it characteristic of all women or only some sections of women? How does the abolition of sexism relate to that of capitalism? And fowing from this, does the women's move ment have any allies and how should allances come about? In particular how should it relate to the working class and its institutions of struggle?
Once one has hacked one's way through Selma James's extre mely opportunistic method of argument and repeated construction of strawmen one can see that it is these problems that she is attempting to solve. The question that she focuses on is the last of these. (Answers to the others are implicit, but the question of how sexism relates to capitalism and the nature of women's social power to struggle against their oppression is argued far more lucidly in an important pamphlet by her friend Maria Dalla Costa on Women and the Subversion of the Community). It is on her analysis of the unions and the theory of work underlying it that The Choice Before Us makes most of its criticisms.
UNIONS AND WORK Instead of analysing the limits and possibilities of the unions in the context of their origin as defensive organisations of the working class in their fight against the incessant tendency of employers to increase the rate of exploitation, she sees them as a cancerous growth on the working class functioning solely as instruments of social control. She accuses them of being one of the major causes of male chauvinism. The Choice Before Us in criticising these arguments does not counterpose a glorified conception of the unions. It shows how the sectoral nature of trade union organısations frequently means that they reflect and reinforce many aspects of bourgeois ideology, in this case male chauvinism, in their attitudes to other sectors of the working class, including working class women, immigrants, etc.
In opposition to Selma's idea of the unions as homogeneously bureaucratic, The Choice Before Us shows how she completely ignores the conflicts which exist within the unions.
These conflicts flow basically from the incompatibility (under all but the most booming economic conditions) of a class compromising leadership with the satisfaction of the membership's economic demands. If such a leadership persists, militant initiatite is taken at lower leveis of the unions, in particular by shop stewards. Selma, to explain such things as the militancy of the miners' strike, which was predo minantly due to these initiatives at the shop steward level, applies the mythical concept of "the autonomous working class community going its own way", Ways of Seeing, by John Berger (Penguin, 60p).
John Berger is the leading Marxist art critic and novelist in Britain today. An ex-member of the Communist Party, he has moved progressively to the left from a dilettante radicalism to a highly committed revolutionary perspective. So much so that at the presentation of a literary prize (for his novel G) recently he denunced the donors for their imperialist conn edions, as well as the art establishment, before announcing his intention of giving half the £5000 prize to the Black Panthers. His work too has become more consistently grounded in scientific materialism, and now seems a good time to deal at length with his latest book His previous non-fiction books (all in paperback) include Art and Revolution, a study of the Soviet sculptor, Niezvestny, Success and Failure of Picasso, one of the few critical and non-adulatory views of this artist, and a collection of short essays on various aspects of art and literature. His latest work, Ways of Seeing, based on the excellent but neglected BBC 2 series. goes one step further and attempts to deal critically with the bourgeois "way of seeing" (or not-seeing) the relation between art and society.
BOURGEOIS IDEOLOGY One of the essential tasks of revolutionaries is to confront bourgeois ideology _ the commonly held ideas about the world -in all its diverse forms, to develop a critical materialist view of all aspects of DOUrCOs sodeLy. nowevcr onc a ca o soeial life that most socialists neglect to analyse at all thoroughly (preferring instead to be guided by "taste" - socially conditioned and often reactionary taste) is the question of art and the social relations of the past and the present which it reveals. Even revolutionaries often see art as something se parate, something 'other" than their politics and therefore at the level of light relief the "holiday" view of art. They remain mystified about the part art plays in expressing the purposes of the ruling-class and in modelling social consciousness. The alternative position often adopted by the left is the crude Stalinist one - "All art is bourgeois and therefore we reject it totally". Berger deals with this position succinctly: "By refusing to enter a conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy. But to r emain innocent may also be to remain ignorant. The issue is not between innocence and knowledge. but between a total appr oach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the e soteric approach of a few specialised experts who are the clerks of the ruling-class in decline." (My emphasis.) For socialists of ether school, Berger's book is a fine introductory exercise in de-mystification. He is attempting to counter the bourgeois mystique of art as remote, eternal and absolutely valid, to which only the initiated elite, with all their profound knowledge about the artist and the painting's financial "pedigree" can relate. He stresses throughout the necessity to approach art on terms other than the claims it makes for itself. The bourgeois view serves to deprive the mass implying that the women's movement should do the same, untainted by involvement in the unions.
She goes on to say that those who argue for working within the unions want the liquidation of the women's movement and its complete absorption into the unions. The Choice Before Us shows that this does not follow. It outlines a strategy for the women's movement to intervene in the unions. This involves the setting up, or in some cases supporting where they exist already (e.g. Pat Sturdy's group in the A.U.E.W.) rank and file action groups of women which will, broadly, have the following three purposes: (a) To organise within the unions against sex discimination, and the conditions that prevent the active participation of women in the union e.g. lack of creche facilities at meetings, inconvenient timing of meetings. (b) To make sure the unions actively support and initiate struggles on questions of women's oppression; not only those de mands that relate immediately to the industrial work situation but also those that concern women's work in the home. This will involve industrial support for demands against the state for nurseries, maternity benetits, contraJohn Berger of people of their cultural heritage and this is dangerous, because it prevents them from locating temselves in history and thus drawing conclusions about what must be done to change the future. "... The art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is stri ving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling-classes...
PROPERTY The section on the nude in art however is a tour de force and the perfect uncompromising foil to Kenneth Clark's bourgeois view of the female human body in art as "object" or pure "form" to be rendered perfect by the artist. Destroying this mystification, Berger points out and illustrates that in the majority of paintings since the Renaissance, nudity has not been an expression of the model's own self and feelings, but a display, a sign of submission to her owner's (or the painting's owner's) demands. He makes the distinction between nakedness, which is to be and be seen as oneself (and relatively rare in art), and nudity, which is never to be seen as oneself, but as property on display which expresses, flatters and celebrates, not one's own sexuality, but the sexuality of the owner or viewer. To drive this point home, Berger takes examples from contemporary "girlie" magazines which fit perfectly well into this degrading tradition and this argument, showing just one more form of female oppression and de-humanisation hiding behind bourgeois norms.
The net is cast wider and the whole role of oil painting since the 16th century, during the epoch of the growing and established bourgeoisie, is put under examination in the next section. During this period oil painting proved to be the medium in art, because art itself became the celebration of property or a flattering depiction of the ruling-classes temselves, as defined by their property. ".... A way of seeing the world, which was ceptives on the N.H.S., etc. (c) To attempt to educate working class men about the relationship of women's oppression to capitalism and therefore to the exploitation of the working class as a whole.
Thus in some senses it is organising for the extension of the principles of organisation of the women's movement into the T.U.'s, not its liquidation, This strategy does not pretend to be the total strategy of the women's movement but only a part of it. Many problems involved in it still need to be worked out - in particular the question of how the organisation of housewives who do not work outside can be achieved and how it can relate to industrial organisation.
Also there needs to be far more detailed analysis of the exact situation of women in the labour force. Here one could usefully apply many of the implications of Mandel's theory of the third industrial revolution, for example the decline of unskilled labour, the increasing need for certain types of killed labour, how these processes effect the situation of women in Britain and thus the specific emphases ef our strategy. Hilary Wainwright ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in oil painting and could not have found it in any other visual art-form. Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality. Oil painting con veyed a vision of total exteriority."
What is argued conclusively is that oil painting, as opposed to other forms of painting, is especially able to render the t angibility, the texture, the lustre and solidity of what it depicts. We can see here the powerful relationship between the economic basis of the society the property ethic and its relations - and its philosophical underpinnings, empiricism, with its emphasis on the reality of surface appearances.
PUBLICITY In the last section, the world of advertising and it images is related to "high art". Not withstanding the protests of academicians, it is shown that far from being in completely different categories, the one is the continuation of the other, though with important differences. It is obvious for a start that the colour camera has taken over from the brush and oil its capacity to render sutface appearances as "real" as possible. However whereas oil painting developed from the principle that you are what you have - the celebration of private property, "rightfully" held - in publicity the spectator-buyer stands in a completely different relation to the world from the spectator-owner. The oil painting began with the facts of the oner's life, but the purpose of publicity is to make the spectator dissatisfied with his present way of life (but on a personal, not a social le vel) and suggests that if he or she buys what it is offering, their lives will become richer and more satisting.
It is argued that publicity is a sort of limited philoso phical system another way of seeing which interprets the world in its own idealised terms and in the process prevents choices which lie outside these terms. Unfortunately reality keeps breaking in, especially in the pages of the colour supplements, where pictures of the starving in Bangla Desh jostle obscenely with "Things happen after a Badedas bath". These are both images in the same culture and the same language which highlight and display undisguisedly the deep contradictions in modern international capitalism.
Lastly it is worth quoting Berger as he deals ruthlessly with his critics: *We are accused of being obsessed with property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and the culture in question which is so obsessed Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be the nature of things and so it is not recognised for what it is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession."
This is a book that all socialists should read. It is short, explicit, vividly illustrated and Berger's aphoristic style, where every phrase makes its separate statement, is a joy to read, It ought to form the basis for any Marxist trying to approach art in a way consistent with the needs of revolutionary activism.
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Strategies for the Women's Women, Work and the Unions, by Selma James (Falling Wall Press, 5p); The Choice Before Us (IMG Publications, Sp)