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Arts of the possible by Adrienne Rich

Off Our Backs, Jan/Feb 2002 by Douglas, Carol Anne

review

Arts of the Possible by Adrienne Rich

(W.W. Norton & Co., 2001)

Why did Adrienne Rich develop an interest in the philosophy of Karl Marx? Why did she feel that feminism without Marx (I don't say Marxism because she writes of Marx, not Marxism, and quotes Marx's saying that he was not a Marxist) was not enough for her? Women who have wondered about those questions can find the answers in Rich's new book of essays, Arts of the Possible.

"My thinking was unable to fulfill itself with feminism alone," Rich writes. I, and perhaps many other feminists, found it disappointing when Rich reached that conclusion. After all, she is the author of feminist classics such as the book Of Woman Born, countless poems, and many essays, especially the groundbreaking "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," that have shaped feminist thought.

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Rich did not abandon feminism-- she prefers the term "women's liberation" as more dynamic; she changed her emphasis. (I agree that "women's liberation" sounds more centered on activism, but it does not indicate that the women involved have developed a philosophy, as "feminism" does.)

Rich came to feel that many feminists' emphasis on individual women's experience, while initially liberating, eventually dovetailed too well with a capitalist society's focus on individual consumerism and rejection of collective action. She writes that by the late 1990s, the mainstream United States no longer had real discussions, but replaced critical argument with personal anecdotes and true confessions. In such an atmosphere, the emphasis on personal experience is no longer as liberating as it once was, Rich thinks. The mainstream media latched onto the personal aspects of feminism but ignored the issues of racism and classism that were raised by Women of Color and working class women, she writes. White, middle-- class women often feared that an emphasis on racism and classism would somehow diminish the emphasis on women instead of enriching it.

Rich points out that U.S. society now features middle-class self-- absorption, with indifference both to ideas and to the larger social order. But the middle class is far from secure. While it has been self-- absorbed, the rich grown richer, the poor have grown more desperate, and middle-class status has been undermined for many, she observes.

Rich began to read Marx around 1980, and discovered his less-known works that emphasized the alienation under capitalism of human relationships to work and to each other. She admiringly quotes Trotskyist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, who said that Marx is the only philosopher of total revolution, the transformation of all human relationships, and revolution in permanence; this means, to Dunayevskaya and to Rich, a society in which all people participate in government and in production. Rich quotes Dunayevskaya saying that without a philosophy of revolution, activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism without saying what it is for.

Rich is saddened that U.S. society has totally dismissed socialism and communism because of the downfall of the dictatorships that ostensibly propounded those ideas. She recalls a chilling saying from Margaret Thatcher's Britain-- "There Is No Alternative"-which now seems to be accepted by U.S. society. The possibility of alternatives has been rubbed out and discredited, Rich writes regretfully.

The United States government and too many of its people have given up on what had been seen as a national project to be a democratic republic with a large and growing middle class and equality of opportunity, Rich writes. She apparently believes that many people held those goals, but they have abandoned them. Democracy is now seen as "free enterprise," so it's not surprising that any politics to further democratic equality is now dismissed as obsolete "big government," Rich writes.

But Rich does not believe that human beings are helplessly trapped by history, though we must act within it. Rich urges people to "do everything humanly possible" for each other. "What is humanly possible if we require something beyond the horrible culture of profit? What's `humanly possible' might be what we bring to the refusal to let our humanity be stolen from us."

Rich feels that too many women have opted for personal, "lifestyle" solutions. Capitalist society has brought some women closer to the center of power, while leaving out most others, she writes.

Therefore, "only a politics of the whole society can resist such assimilation," Rich says. She evidently means a politics of progressive women and men with perceptions derived from Marx's philosophy.

Rich feels that individual women's experiences need to be understood in context. "With any personal history, what is to be done? What do we know when we know your story?" As originally founded by Redstockings, consciousness-- raising involved developing women's political perspectives. Rich does not call for a return to that type of consciousness-raising, but perhaps that is what is needed.

Arts of the possible by Adrienne Rich

Off Our Backs, Jan/Feb 2002 by Douglas, Carol Anne

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