Dialectic of Sex

"When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see therefore at first the picture as a whole with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive, naive, but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away." FRIEDRICH ENGELS


By Alex P. Vidal


HOLLYWOOD, California -- What is the deepest division in nature? 
The biological inequality of men and women, says Shulamith Firestone in her brilliant book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
But what is fact is not necessarily human. 
To survive in our time we must break down politically traditional sex-roles, she suggests. 
Ten provocative chapters push Women's Liberation to a new radical peak and paint a persuasive picture of a post-revolutionary society where the sexual class system has been eradicated.
Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the modern media--that paralyzes our society.
With penetrating insight into the political machinery that consolidates male power, the author examines the historical development of special cultural constructs--such as romantic love--that have kept women subservient to their gradually eroding roles as wives and mothers. 
She looks at the cultural backlash to the feminist movement and, finally, envisions in amazing detail a post-revolutionary computer society in which the deepest source of social and cultural disease, the sexual class system, has been eradicated, thereby allowing for the first successful revolution in history.


DEEP


Sex class is so deep as to be invisible, according to Firestone. 
Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labor force. "But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child--'That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!'--is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction--the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition--is an honest one," writes Firestone. 
"That so profound a change cannot be easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g., 'political,' is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it."
Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, she says to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity.
"Why should a woman give up her precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she could not hope to win?" she asks. 
"But, for the first time in some countries, the preconditions for feminist revolution exist--indeed, the situation is beginning to demand such a revolution." 


MASSACRE


Firestone says the first women are fleeing the massacre, and, shaking and tottering, are beginning to find each other. 
Their move is reportedly a careful joint observation, to resensitize a fractured consciousness.
"This is painful," she adds. "No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. To so heighten one's sensitivity to sexism presents problems far worse than the black militant's new awareness of racism: Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of nature.
"Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. Others continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful sensitivity to female oppression existing for a purpose: eventually to eliminate it."
Firestone explains: "Before we can act to change a situation, however, we must know how it has arisen and evolved, and through what institutions it now operates. Engels' '(We must) examine the historic succession of events from which the antagonism has sprung in order to discover in the conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.'


REVOLUTION


For feminist revolution, the authors suggests the need for an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. 
"More comprehensive. For we are dealing with a larger problem," she points out, "with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself."
Firestone says in creating such analysis, "we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels: Not their literal opinions about women--about the condition of women as an oppressed class they know next to nothing, recognizing it only where it overlaps with economics--but rather their analytic method."
Marx and Engels outdid their socialist forerunners in that they developed a method of analysis which was both dialectical and materialist. 
The first in centuries to view history dialectically, they saw the world as process, a natural flux of action and reaction, of opposites yet inseparable and interpenetrating. 
Because they were able to perceive history as movie rather than as snapshot, they attempted to avoid falling into the stagnant "metaphysical" view that had trapped so many other great minds.


VIEW


Firestone says they combined this view of the dynamic interplay of historical forces with a materialist one, that is, they attempted for the first time to put historical and cultural change on a real basis, to trace the development of economic classes to organic causes. 
By understanding thoroughly the mechanics of history, they hoped to show men how to master it.
"Socialist thinkers prior to Marx and Engels, such as Fourier, Owen, and Bebel, had been able to do no more than moralize about existing social inequalities, positing and ideal world where class privilege and exploitation should not exist--in the same way that early feminist thinkers posited a world where male privilege and exploitation ought not exist--by mere virtue of good will," writes Firestone.
"In both cases, because the early thinkers did not really understand how the social injustice had evolved, maintained itself, or could be eliminated, their ideas existed in a cultural vacuum, utopian. Marx and Engels, on the other hand,  attempted a scientific approach to history. They traced the class conflict to its real economic origins, projecting an economic solution based on objective economic preconditions already present: the seizure by the proletariat of the means of production would lead to a communism in which government had withered away, no longer needed to repress the lower class for the sake of the higher. In the classless society the interest of every individual would be synonymous with those of the larger society."  
But the doctrine of historical materialism, as she explains further, much as it was a brilliant advance over previous historical analysis, was not the complete answer, as later events bore out. 
For though Marx and Engels grounded their theory in reality, it was only a partial reality.