Neglected or Misunderstood Page 9
She is therefore actually advancing a feminist critique of science; one that refuses to accept a view of science as developing neutrally or objectively and that insists instead that the course of scientific research is influenced by the values and prejudices of the wider (in this case, male-supremacist) culture of which it is a part. She argues, for example, that the technological know-how to create the female contraceptive pill existed long before the pill itself, progress in this direction having been impeded by a moral framework according to which the purpose of sex was reproduction and not pleasure – and certainly not women’s pleasure. One immediate consequence of this is that it is a revolutionary imperative that women now enter the ranks of science, since only then can we expect to see an alteration in the course of technology towards the transformation of reproduction that women’s freedom requires:
It is clear by now that research in the area of reproduction is itself being impeded by cultural lag and sexual bias. The money allocated for specific kinds of research, the kinds of research done are only incidentally in the interests of women when at all … that women are excluded from science is directly responsible for the tabling of research on oral contraceptives for males. (180)
Neither celebrating science and technology uncritically, nor dismissing them, the Dialectic instead mounts a passionate call to the Left to give up its dangerous romanticization of nature and ‘rather than breast-beating about the immorality of scientific research’ focus radical energies on ‘demands for control of scientific discoveries by and for the people’ (179). In fact, Firestone argues, the current stage of male-dominated empiricism is only ‘to culture … what the bourgeois period is to the Marxian dialectic’ – a period whose manifest contradictions contain the potential to generate revolution (163). There will therefore be a cultural revolution in addition to an economic and sexual one, and it is one that will bring about ‘the reintegration of the Male (Technological Mode) with the Female (Aesthetic Mode), to create an androgynous culture surpassing the highs of either’ (174).
The family as anti-revolutionary force?
For Firestone, fear of technology is really fear of dehumanization: of a world in which the technocratic values of efficiency, quantification and control have supplanted the more “human” ones of kindness, nurturing and love. Because the family is so frequently held to be the site of these human values, it is perhaps unsurprising that in so many dystopian visions of a technology society, the family has been all but destroyed. Orwell’s novel is a case in point. Part of the horror in 1984 is that parents have been brought to fear their own children, who at any moment might denounce them for ‘thought crime.’ With its former bonds of trust and loyalty now extinguished, even the family in 1984 has succumbed to the total encroachment of totalitarian state power.
Firestone in fact accepts that ‘despite its oppressiveness [the family] is now the last refuge from the encroaching power of the state, a shelter that provides the little emotional warmth, privacy, and individual comfort now available’ (188). She therefore needs to show that her vision of a future technological society differs from the 1984 scenario in this crucial respect, that in eliminating the family it is not seeking to destroy this last preserve of warmth and human kindness, but rather to liberate those qualities from their containment within the family unit. Her proposed alternative to the nuclear family will seek to ‘reestablish the female element in the outside world, to incorporate the “personal” into the “public,”’ to diffuse these qualities in order to ‘humanize the larger society’ (191).
Again, here we see Firestone offering a more nuanced analysis than is often allowed. It is not that there is nothing positive at all about the nuclear family. But part of the problem is that it is asked to do too much. It is made to take on an impossible task – to be a sanctuary against the encroachments of an increasingly hostile world – and some of its pathologizing effects result from this. There are some interesting correspondences with writer Mark Fisher here, whose recent Capitalist Realism argues that ‘with the public sphere under attack and the safety nets that a “Nanny State” used to provide being dismantled, the family becomes an increasingly important place of respite from the pressures of a world in which instability is a constant.’55 Fisher points out how, ironically, one tendency within capitalism itself is towards the undermining of the family (which at the same time it relies on, to reproduce workers), as the demands of the workplace ‘den[y] parents time with children, [and put] intolerable stress on couples as they become the exclusive source of affective consolation for each other’ (33).
Late capitalism – both Firestone and Fisher seem to say – encourages a diminution in our sphere of affective relationships, of the number of people whom we can trust, or towards whom we have a responsibility of care, until this sphere encompasses immediate family only. The negative results are two-fold. What is consequently demanded of partners, parents or children is something that is impossible to achieve – that they will meet all of our emotional needs – and hence the family all too often becomes a site of disappointment and recrimination. And at the same time lack of emotional responsiveness to others outside this circle – lack of kindness and compassion, expressed as political support for policies against immigration, or against the redistribution of wealth – becomes reconfigured as morally permissible, even admirable.
Firestone calls this attitude the ‘chauvinism that develops in the family’ (177). She links it to the public lack of concern about over-population and its threat to human well-being and even survival: ‘why worry about the larger social good just so long as You and Yours are “happy”’? The nuclear family gestates an ‘Us-Against-Them chauvinism’ (177). Blood is thicker than water. The public is a matter of abstraction. What really matters is the private and the concrete. The family functions as a form of ideological enclosure, appropriating human kindness for itself, and jealously containing it within its own borders. As Stevi Jackson notes, Firestone’s concerns here are very close to those expressed by the socialist feminist, Lynne Segal. She quotes Segal thus:
In our intensely individualist, competitive, capitalist society, love and concern for others become inappropriate outside our very own small family groupings. Class privilege and racist exclusion are most frequently justified, by both women and men, in terms of the interests of one’s own children.56
In contrast, Firestone asks us to consider what it would be to liberate warmth and compassion from their confinement to within the nuclear family – to humanize a dehumanizing society that is not waiting for us some time in the future but is already here. For her, what is required to achieve this rehumanized society is the technological destruction of the nuclear family, and in the next chapter we will consider her model for how this might be achieved. But as we are doing so, we might reasonably ask whether Firestone is right to insist on this as a necessary condition of a rehumanized society. Is the destruction of the family really the only way to achieve this?
8
Revolution: To Blueprint, or Not to Blueprint?
The classic trap for any revolutionary is always, “What’s your alternative?” But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it: in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know.
(Firestone, p.202)
The truth of these words will be evident to anyone who has followed the course of the anti-capitalist protest movements of the last decade or so. So what’s your alternative? It is frequently a rhetorical question. If no answer is forthcoming, then the questioner triumphs in having revealed the pointlessness, self-indulgence, vapidity and sheer inanity of the protest. If an answer is proffered, however, then it is likely to be scoffingly dismissed as utopian, absurd, impossible. It is a manifestation of Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ – the ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (2).
Firesto
ne was writing at a different time, before the collapse of the USSR and the global spread of capitalist economics and neoliberal ideology. In 1969 the operations of capital in the West had produced a hegemonic crisis leading to the emergence of a counter culture in which many thousands of people, especially young people, precisely did believe that an alternative was possible, and indeed perhaps even probable. Her imagined interrogator is not necessarily a representative from the older generation or the establishment, however, because what Firestone is seeking an alternative to is not only capitalism, but, as we know, biological reproduction; and she is well aware that resistance to changing this is as likely to come from her revolutionary confederates. The family, she says, has a uniquely powerful grasp on our imaginations, since it is the immediate structure within which our very selves are forged:
The nature of the family unit is such that it penetrates the individual more deeply than any other social organization we have: it literally gets him ‘where he lives.’ I have shown how the family shapes his psyche to its structure – until ultimately, he imagines it absolute, talk of anything else striking him as perverted. (203)
As Nina Power has written, ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the death of the nuclear family.’57
So when Firestone comes in her final chapter to describe a possible post-revolutionary society, she does so because she recognizes the political dangers of a failure of the imagination. To be unable to imagine things being different slides easily into the belief that they could not be different; that, however bad things are now, they must be like this, and that to protest against them or call for change is just so much pissing in the wind. There is therefore a dilemma, she feels, posed by the twin dangers of not outlining an alternative – and thus inviting depoliticizing pessimism – and outlining one that will inevitably be surpassed by unfolding events. For ‘any specific direction must arise organically out of the revolutionary action itself,’ she says, ruling out the construction of any blueprint – if what is meant by that is a design or template to be obeyed to the letter – and insisting that radical political movements be self-critical and their objectives and strategies remain open to revision. But the force of the dilemma leads her ‘to feel tempted here to make some “dangerously utopian”’ concrete proposals. She stresses, however, that these are mere sketches, ‘meant to stimulate thinking in fresh areas rather than to dictate the action,’ and she begs her reader to ‘Keep in mind that these are not meant as final answers’ (203).
Unfortunately many don’t. Firestone is frequently ridiculed on the basis of her revolutionary proposals, the alleged unfeasibility or undesirability of which are then treated as sufficient grounds to dismiss her work in its entirety. In the following I shall argue that some aspects of the model she draws up are not so very far removed from proposals that are in fact seriously considered, at least in radical political movements, today. One reason this is important is that Firestone’s revolutionary future, seemingly dependent upon technological developments that still today seem the stuff of science fiction, can seem so far off as to invite the kind of paralyzing quietism that her sketch is intended to ward off. Artificial wombs? Robots to eliminate alienated labor? If these are a precondition of liberation, then we might seem to be so far away from them that it is hard to see what form any radical political action could take now, in their absence. I suggest that this problem is partially ameliorated by the existence of more concrete and currently achievable, although less dramatic courses of action, that Firestone’s text points to.
The demands
While Firestone’s proposals about the form a post-revolutionary society might take are tentative, the demands that any such society must meet are not. These are described as ‘structural imperatives’ (187), meaning that each is a necessary condition for the elimination of the oppressions wrought by patriarchal capitalism. She identifies four such demands:
The freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible, and the diffusion of the child-rearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women. […]
The political autonomy, based on economic independence, of both women and children. […]
The complete integration of women and children into society. […]
The sexual freedom of women and children. (185–7)
For most of these demands she will identify measures that can be taken immediately and that do not rely upon the imagined development of technologies, although she typically considers such intermediate measures to be matters of reforms, which do not satisfy in full the necessity for revolutionary transformation. The imperatives can be elucidated in relation to four key headings: production, reproduction, children, and sex and sexuality.
Production
Key to emancipation will be a transformed relationship to production, and this, Firestone believes, is possible now, for the first time in history, because of cybernation – the replacing of human workers through advanced technologies such as computers.
Cybernation is of course in evidence all around us today, and to that extent Firestone’s predictions were prophetic. When we take money out of the bank, buy goods in the supermarket or train tickets, we can do so without engaging with another human being at all. Of course, critics suggest that this contributes to a society of alienation, and workers and trade unions justifiably fear automation being used to lay people off. Firestone is not unaware of such dangers. In keeping with her “dialectical” approach to technology she sees cybernation as it develops under current economic and political structures as producing a probable worsening of conditions – albeit one that eventually hastens revolution. It is likely first of all, she predicts, to produce a range of ‘lower rung … white collar service jobs’ (‘keypunch operator, computer programmer’) whose transitional character will make women (‘the transient labor force par excellence’) the ideal employees (183). In consequence of bringing women into the labor force in unprecedented numbers, this development will, secondly, erode the male’s status as ‘head of the household’ and ‘may shake up family life and traditional sex roles … profoundly’ (183). Thirdly, she forecasts that as automation replaces traditional jobs and increases unemployment there will be an increase in ‘unrest of the young, the poor, the unemployed’ (183).
Much of this was prescient. Firestone seems to have predicted what theorists describe as today’s feminization of labor – the increasing numbers of women within the paid workforce since the 1970s and the increasing precarity (for both men and women) of many jobs. It is also undoubtedly the case that the displacement of the man’s traditional position as sole (or main) breadwinner has brought about a restructuring of traditional sex roles, with few men in families today occupying the position of unquestioned patriarch (although Firestone would no doubt insist that this restructuring is only partial, that it does not represent true equality of men and women within the family and could not do so until reproduction itself is fundamentally transformed). Whether her prediction will be proved true, that by increasing the difficulty of obtaining employment, cybernation will make ‘revolutionary ferment … become a staple’ (183–4), remains to be seen. It would be hard though to contend that unemployment – and poverty and precarity within employment – are not hugely significant motivating factors in today’s anti-capitalist movements.
The claim that cybernation is integral to emancipation is not only a claim about its ability to foment revolutionary feeling, however. The real crux of the argument is that Firestone sees cybernation as holding out the promise of eliminating alienated labor. On a Marxist understanding alienated labor refers to what happens to work under conditions of industrial capital, when the worker is deprived of his or her ability to determine a project for themselves and to see it through from inception to completion. Often taken to be typical of the kind of labor Marx had in mind is the situation of the factory worker – condemned to the drudgery of fitting just one part to a product as it makes its way down the pr
oduction line – but the situation of today’s legions of workers within the service economy fundamentally fits this description (think of the call center operator, without power to change much that a customer might be complaining about, and distrusted even to depart from their script). In Firestone’s analysis the end-point of cybernation will be the taking over by machines of wearisome and unpleasant functions previously performed by people, and this will liberate people to pursue meaningful work activities of their own choosing.
As with most of her proposals, there are transitional and more distant goals. Under the ‘socialism of a cybernetic economy’ (210) the initial aim would be to ‘redistribute drudgery equally’ (211). During this transitionary period, ‘while we still had a money economy’ there would be for each person ‘a guaranteed income from the state to take care of basic physical needs’ distributed ‘regardless of age, work, prestige, birth’ (211). The aim, however, is to eliminate drudgery altogether: ‘With the further development and wise use of machines, people could be freed from toil, “work” divorced from wages and redefined’ (211). Her ultimate aim is to produce for all ‘What is now found only among the elite, the pursuit of specialized interests for their own sake’ (211). Under ‘cybernetic communism,’ a monetary economy will have been replaced by the direct allocation of resources according to need, time will have been freed up for leisure and work will have been redefined as ‘“play”’ – meaning not that it is not serious, but that it is undertaken for reasons of its intrinsic interest to the individual who is doing it, since work that does not have this interest will have been outsourced to machines (213, 211).