Thoughts in regards to the Popular Front, its destruction, and the relationship of that destruction to the rise of '2nd Wave' Feminism

It's been a while since I have put up anything on the blog.  I've been trying to get finished with my dissertation, and put together two substantially revised chapters over the past quarter, the last two weeks focused on the revisions of my very unorganized Gilman chapter.  Within that context, some folks have been wondering about my argument in that case.  I thought I would put up this discussion here, which supplies the context of my argument.

Merril’s work needs to be placed within the context of the destruction of the Popular Front of the 1930’s and 1940’s with the rise of the cold war and McCarthyism. The destruction of that social formation ended an array of political and aesthetic possibilities that existed within that historical bloc. Those radicals that survived the purges and the deportations of the period had to create a new style and form to be heard. The artists involved in that project were left without a cultural milieu to work within, or any substantial institutional support. Ideological purges were a defining aspect of the era, occurring in locations as disparate as the university and the steel foundry. Chandler Davis noted that between the years of 1947-1950, “most institutions, from the government through the unions and universities to the American Civil Liberties Union… declared Communists unwelcome,” setting a precedent for the years to follow. (Davis 272) He also notes that the loyalty oaths utilized by those institutions not only restricted the involvement of members in the Communist Party, but also organizations with associations with the Communist Party. Radical artists had to navigate this minefield in order to find legitimate spaces to offer critiques of the society and avoid censure. Failure to negotiate these dangers could lead to the blacklists, that is, the inability to publish or work in the industries of popular media. In a few cases, it led to criminal charges or expulsion from the country.

In order to understand the full implications of this destruction, it’s necessary to briefly sketch out the impact of the Popular Front on U.S. culture and politics. Until recently, the dominant critical interpretation of that formation reflected the narrative produced by the forces that supported its destruction, putting an emphasis on Moscow, the naiveté of artists, etc. However there have been a number alternative interpretations of the period, most notably the argument presented in Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front. Denning makes the argument that the Popular Front was a part of a larger cultural formation, one that he calls the Cultural Front. “The cultural front was… the result of the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement—the Popular Front—and the modern cultural apparatus of mass entertainment and education.” (Denning xvii-xviii) The formation of the cultural front consisted of a mass movement, a tentative formation of organic intellectuals, and institutional structures, ranging from magazine publishers to trade unions. For Denning, this formation cannot be simply reduced to the influence of the Communist Party and “Moscow gold.” Instead, it constituted a counter-hegemonic force within the society, a force crucial to the New Deal alliance, and yet, “making a culture that was neither a Party nor a liberal New Deal culture.”[1](Denning 5) For Denning the culture of the Popular Front constitutes radical social democratic social formation in which the Communist Party played a significant role, although not a central role. At the same time, the cultural front was inextricably linked to the rising mediated spectacle of mass culture.

As Stuart Ewen notes through his analysis of advertising, that system, the system of mass culture and the structure of the advertising that supports it, is intimately linked with the system of mass industrial production.[2] These institutions not only represented industrial capitalism, but were enmeshed in its interests, material processes, and social networks. They operated simultaneously as a system of legitimization for industrial capitalism, and contributed to the process of incorporating workers into that system as consumers, rather than as simple cogs. Mass production simultaneously demanded an increased mass consumption base to thrive. As Stuart Ewen notes, a group of intellectuals began to develop a sort of social democracy of consumption, responding to Henry Ford’s experiments in social control in his factories.[3] Ewen notes, “The image, the commercial, reaches out to sell more than a service or a product; it sells a way of understanding the world. The basic premise is that in a corporate, industrial world, it is the agencies of communication that provide the mechanisms of social order.”[4] The apparatuses of the social democracy of consumption are implemented to simultaneously respond to and shape popular desires, while maintaining the basic structures of capitalist accumulation. Rather than limiting themselves to the limited, crudely instrumental forms of control used by Ford, the intellectuals developing these structures began to draw on the recent development of psychoanalysis, linking structures of consumption with formations of desire. Ewen’s work links the shift in mass production with the rise of an image based advertising structure, tying into unconscious libidinal structures of the society. The cultural front can only be understood as a network of individuals and institutions the simultaneously immanent to that nascent system, yet exogenous to its logic.

Denning argues that the cultural front constituted a powerful counter-hegemonic force within the period of the 1930’s and the 1940’s, as well as containing a powerful legacy for the rest of the century through its intellectual, literary, and musical contributions. Denning notes, the most literal measure of that power can be seen in a 1942 Fortune poll in which, “25 percent of Americans favored socialism and another 35% percent had an open mind about it.” (Denning 4) However, the depth of that success went considerably beyond those numbers. The Popular Front was linked to innumerable campaigns from union organizing, fights against racial discrimination, to direct action efforts to keep families in their houses and apartments. Denning notes that these modes of politics drew on the tradition of the “voluntary reform association”, large popular organizations focused on single issues, from the League of Women Shoppers to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. (Denning 63) These public sphere activities merged with the massive labor unrest and strike activity in cities ranging from San Francisco, Minneapolis, Harlan, and Detroit to form a network of organizations and activists throughout the country. Those structures posed an alternative vision of inclusion, one that was based on a participatory social democracy, rather than a vision of inclusion based on the social democracy of consumption being developed by the intellectuals linked to Fordist forms of production.

However, this formation, what Denning, working in the vocabulary of Antonio Gramsci, refers to as a historical bloc, was quickly destroyed in the post war years. The alliances of the Popular Front had already been put under strain because of the acceptance of the no strike clauses insisted on by the Roosevelt administration during the war, as well as the acceptance of the Japanese internment camps by most of the Popular Front. These actions simultaneously delinked the cultural formation of the Popular Front from worker militancy and led the institutions of the Popular Front into a more uncritical alliance with the Roosevelt administration. However, this alliance began to quickly unravel with the end of the war. There was an immediate upsurge in labor militancy with the end of the war, represented by a wave of strikes throughout the country. The reaction to this upsurge in labor militancy was the Taft-Hartley act, which both limited the abilities of labor to strike and disallowed unions with membership involved in the Communist Party to benefit from the National Labor Relations Act. Despite initial opposition by the CIO leadership to this act, the conservative elements of the federation took advantage of the law to expel Communists and Communist affiliated unions from the CIO, effectively removing the influence of the radical left from the union movement.

The shift in the trade union movement had an immediate effect on the cultural front of the movement. The trade unions were a major funding source for publications such as the Federated Press, as well as a whole set of union publications. (Horowitz 102-152) Denning notes that half of all Popular Front publications were funded by the union movement, and this funding evaporated as those unions either became more conservative to respond to Taft-Hartley, or became smaller, more embattled units outside the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. (Footnote) In addition, subscription funded publications such as PM closed due to cheaper, advertising funded publications. At the same time, the independent studios involved in the production of socially conscious films closed due to the post war economic crisis in the film industry as well as the effects of the red scare. (Footnote) The destruction of these institutions also contributed to the destruction of the cultural front. With a few notable exceptions such as the independently financed Salt of the Earth, spaces for explicit radical critiques in popular publications evaporated, and the attempts to express radical ideas could only occur in veiled terms.

Furthermore there had been a radical transformation of the social structures and the class structure of the nation. Many of the political goals of the Popular Front were accomplished by the liberal New Deal State. It’s already been noted that the middle class had double from 30% in pre-depression times to 60% after the war.[5] The United States government worked to create the conditions for economic security internally. In addition to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board, the intervention in education was probably the most obvious of the interventions, taking the form of the G.I. Bill for education. Although it also included the National Defense Education Act, which both subsidized industries and the education of individual scientists. These policies were also linked to a shift in the loan structure of housing, which allowed for families to purchase a house with only a very small deposit. However, these benefits structurally excluded African Americans. These transformations, as David Roediger notes in his recent work, Working Towards Whiteness, occurred within the white supremacist context of the New Deal. The shifts in the access to housing, education, and other benefits was segregated at best, structurally reinforcing the practices of redlining and restrictive covenants, and at worst, were completely inaccessible to African-Americans. The programs and institutions constituted what historian Ira Katznelson called affirmative action programs for whites.

The post-New Deal political consensus can be read as a combination of fulfilling the incorporation of the white working classes and former new immigrants as consumers, rather than simply as cogs, and the systemic destruction of the radical elements of the Popular Front who wanted a more radical destruction of the society. The need to incorporate working classes into the society as something beyond simple cogs of the machine had been seen as early as the turn of the century, by a number of intellectuals responding to the phenomenon of mass production introduced by Ford. These individuals “Built on the expanded production and the economic potential of consumer markets, advertising created the imagery, the aesthetic, of a social-democratic capitalism, one that understood and would claim to solve the most basic contradictions of modern life.”[6] These theories had been developed around the turn of the century, but the working classes remained too impoverished to be fully incorporated in a consumer society. As we had seen previously in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, project of incorporation depended on a combination of modes of expertise and through that, a re-imagination of the reproductive labor of the household, although the modes of redistribution to create that vision were left unimagined. The radical activism of the Popular Front through its demands for redistributive programs and contributions to industrial unionism ironically created the conditions to fulfill the promises made by Fordist democratic capitalism.

The new regime of consumption was to be anchored in the new suburban household. This household was meant to fulfill a multiplicity of purposes, social, cultural, and psychic. Elaine Tyler May notes that the new household was widely seen as an analogous form of containment, a domestic equivalent to the Cold War foreign policy of the U.S. government of the late 1940’s through the 1950’s as a way of neutralizing the class struggle through the containment of the home. Uncannily replicating the logic implicit in Gilman’s Herland, the household was supposed to act as the supplement to the alienated and regimented nature of the workplace, providing a space of leisure, and the creation of social meaning. That supplement was dependent on the labor of women who were expected to carry the weight of this process. To accomplish that, the household had to take on a radically different function within the society. As Stephanie Coontz notes, the post-war period was defined by a cultural shift in the family structure as well as the economic shift discussed earlier. As I noted in the earlier chapter, the vast majority of new housing was constructed in the suburbs, and the new families distanced themselves from their parents, moving out of their parents’ house earlier, and moving farther away from them. The new nuclear family additionally was designed to fulfill the social psychic and emotional needs of its members in an unprecedented manner, marking former homo-social gathering places such as the bar as pathological. The new household was both the sign and seal of the guaranteed social wage, and the compensation for the lost possibility of social democracy.

Within this context, Betty Friedan offers a useful narrative of the shift from the formation of the Popular Front to the rise of a feminist politic in the wake of the ruins of that earlier formation. Daniel Horowitz maps out this transformation in his biography, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. Horowitz places Friedan’s intellectual development at the center of the culture of the Popular Front, from her role as the editor of her university paper, SCAN (Smith College Associated News), to her involvement with the Popular Front news service, and for the new service of the radical trade union, the UE. Friedan was intensely involved in what Michael Denning called the ‘laboring of American culture,’ the creation of genuinely participatory social democracy within the structures of mass culture, both within the workplace, and through modes of consumption. At the same time, her involvement gestured towards the nascent forms of feminism contained in the Popular Front, both through the participation of women in the movement, but more notably, through later efforts of the movement to distinguish itself from the explicitly patriarchal politics of fascism, leading to connections on the part of the movement with the initially suspicious institutions of the official women’s movement. However, she also mapped the disintegration of that alliance. She was pushed out of the first job because of a combination of political conflicts, and the news service’s desire to return jobs to veterans through firing women to open spaces. The UE position collapsed due to the attacks on the union because of their refusal to recognize the stipulations of the Taft-Hartley Act. For Friedan, the loss of these jobs constituted a fundamental betrayal of the Popular Front, gesturing to its limitations and defeat.

The 1950’s were a period of reevaluation for Friedan, as she married and moved to the suburbs. She worked as a freelance writer for a variety of women’s magazines and was involved in neighborhood politics. Horowitz notes that Friedan’s shift in concerns, from the urban to the suburban; from the problems with poverty to the problems with prosperity were a common theme within the work of social criticism of the time. This collective effort can be seen as an attempt to produce a new political aesthetic that could be heard through the atmosphere of red baiting and the cold war, and produced a new critical framework to understand the new prosperity. However, Friedan’s work was markedly different than other leftist intervention through her emphasis on the suburban household, and expectations put upon women within that household. She focused on its many functions in the maintenance of the new dominant structures of the society, mapping out the construction and legitimization of the new role of women through the expertise of home economists and psychologists in the pages of women’s magazines. She argued that women’s restriction to the household effectively legitimated and expanded levels of consumption needed for the Fordist state, and created a way of mediating and creating an escape valve for the pressures created by the new society. Friedan states this quite polemically,

“The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home…. No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on “the American woman.” Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous of the purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it “for the wife and kids.” And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur or dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures.” (Friedan 297)

The figure of the housewife then becomes the lynchpin for the entire social system of the post war era. She simultaneously acted as a force of legitimating remaining in the system for men, and at the same time, became an escape valve for the anger and aggression produced within such a system. Friedan implicates the entire superstructure of expertise, from psychologists to home economists in this process. The professionalization of child raising demanded by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, rather than facilitating new forms of collectivity in the household, was used to further isolate housewives, legitimating the new system of consumptive social democracy. The patriarchal control of the household became the social contract between men, legitimizing the often meaningless and repetitive labor of the Fordist factory or the assembly line logic of the business office. Drawing from the work of Sylvia Federici, the ‘mystique’ of domestic femininity created an implicit cross-class alliance between primarily white men, not only dependent on the social wage, but also on the access to women as a commons for men. It expanded the sexual contract to the white working class as well as the middle classes. The contract offered both material as well as psychic benefits to those who accepted its strictures.

The power of Friedan’s text largely arises through her rhetorical identification with the feminine mystique. That is to say, the power of her narrative is derived through her claim to be a housewife negotiating her way through this new form of domesticity. However, it is precisely this rhetorical claim to the conventional role of the housewife that causes a set of limitations to the text. To begin, Friedan’s censorship of her radical past leads to an erasure of the history of working class. Unlike many later radical feminists, Friedan’s claims about the mystique are limited to the post-war period, but her history of women’s activism is limited to the activities of the middle classes. Women’s union and radical activism is placed under erasure, which limits the forms of activism analyzed in the text.[7] Additionally, Friedan’s critique is dependent on her engagement with the psychological conventions of her time. That engagement is often quite critical of the discipline’s complicity with the feminine mystique, but it also embraces the hetero-normative impulse of psychology, arguing that homosexuality is a possible pathological response to the mystique.[8] If Friedan strategically engages with these conventions to be heard, these conventions profoundly shape and limit the epistemological possibilities of the text.

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[1] Ibid., 5.

[2] Stuart Ewen, Channels of Desire,

[3] Stuart Ewen, Channels of Desire, 37

[4] Stuart Ewan, Channels of Desire, 42

[5] Look for this fact again

[6] Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, 37

[7] Friedan, x.  See also Horowitz and Coontz

[8] Friedan,

social reproduction and the post-war

“What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labor by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labor into itself—‘as though its body were by love possessed.’”
--Karl Marx

I was initially unsure how to begin this project. To be honest, my examination of literature doesn’t follow a path that could be labeled explicitly feminist. However there is a question that I have been following in the guise of cultural studies that could be linked up with a feminist politics, both producing a theoretical framework that is involved in that work and a framework that can think through the politics of feminism. This project is linked up with a certain concept of the popular. It poses the same problem that Gramsci poses in the Prison Notebooks “to establish not why a book is “beautiful” but why it is “read,” “popular,” “sought after.”[1] To begin to pose the problem in these terms is to begin to ask how structures of power are reproduced within moments of the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’. It also points to their contingency and perhaps the possibility of those circuits.

This, of course, is not the first time for this question to be posed. One can read it in the competing narratives of the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School, and in the various uptakes of cultural studies, most notably the readings by American critics in the 1990’s. Stuart Hall in his essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ best describes the binary produced in these debates. He notes that “the study of popular culture has tended to oscillate wildly between the two alternative poles of that dialectic—containment/resistance.”[2] These terms that have some value when constituted dialectically, become problematic when separated. I want to read the popular within that tension. The popular must both draw from the lines of flight from capital and the ways that those lines of flight are captured again and made productive for capital. I will only approach this question at the very end of the paper, and briefly. The primary focus will be on the question of reproduction and the feminist political response to this in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

In order to do this, I want to begin by producing a provisional definition of the concept of reproduction. I will begin with the way that Louis Althusser in his unfinished text, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses defines it. This will be revised by an examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s investigations into the question of reproduction in her most significant work, The Accumulation of Capital. This will challenge some of the conservatism that Althusser reads into the reproduction of structures of domination in capital. I will then move into a discussion of the ways that the structures of reproduction have been challenged and rerouted by new forms of collectivity created by a feminist and queer politics. I will end the piece with a discussion of how these challenges have been taken up in popular forms of media, most notably television.

The question of how capitalism reproduces itself on a day to day level became a focus for Louis Althusser in his well read essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The essay has become a cheap and short way for many college courses to dismiss a Marxian politic and methodology, but it is worth returning to in order to bring out certain structural elements in the everyday. He begins this effort with a fairly conventional discussion of the ways that reproduction has been discussed within a Marxist context. Most of this has focused on the reproduction of the means of production, where Althusser states that he is going to focus on the reproduction of the relations of production. He states early in the essay.

I shall say that the reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.[3]

Althusser is beginning to point to a whole series of institutions that are required for the continuation of capitalism’s existence. It isn’t enough to reproduce the means of production, and the skills needed for that production, but one also needs to reproduce the social order which produces the logic of the former. These institutions are needed in order to reproduce a ‘submission to the ruling ideology for workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology for the agents of exploitation and reproduction.” Althusser finds these institutions primarily outside of the workplace itself. Following the footsteps of Antonio Gramsci, he finds these structures primarily in the institution of the school (which he sees as the replacement of the church as the dominant ISA) and the institution of the family.

One may not be entirely convinced by the narrative that Althusser gives to the transition, but the more significant argument is the way that ideology works in this system of reproduction. Althusser argues against an earlier conception of ideology that makes it into a form of illusion or false consciousness. Instead he argues that ideology is made up of material practices constructed in a nexus of institutions. Althusser expresses this in the following terms, “his ideas are material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.”[4]

Althusser marks modern subjectivity as being produced in the nexus of two main institutions the school and the family. Although if we take Foucault seriously, we also have to recognize that these institutions are produced by and propped up by a whole other series of institutions, and by the production of a whole series of knowledges. This places the most important work of reproducing dominant structures of society into what had been constructed as the private sphere. The narrative Foucault creates of this is contiguous with the history of capitalism. It has its most productive moments of creation at the moment of the middle of the 16th century and at the beginning of the 19th century.[5]

The most significant spaces for the reproduction of the logic of capitalism occur in the disciplinary space of the school and the discourses of sexuality in the family. These spaces constitute the locus points for the operations of the “polymorphous techniques of power.”[6] This productive arrangement was initially “elaborated in its more complex and intense forms, by and for the privileged classes, spread through the entire social body.”[7] There is something is dropped out of this account, that needs to be recognized, which is the way that the colonies acted as laboratory for this creation, but I will have to leave that aside for now. The important thing to draw from this is that the household has been made productive for the current structures of modern disciplinary power. It has done this precisely through its neutralization as a space of political contestation, by placing it in the private sphere. This will become an important issue later in the paper, but lets return to the more formal question of reproduction of the relations of power.

The difficulty that I find in Althusser (although not in Foucault’s) notion of the production of ideology, is its conservative quality. The reproduction that Althusser describes doesn’t capture the violent ruptural nature of capitalism, nor does it approach its appropriative nature. In order to capture that, I want to make a move that may seem a little retrograde at initial consideration, but it may be the two steps backwards that we need to make to make one step forwards. Rosa Luxemburg also approached this issue of reproduction in her work, The Accumulation of Capital, only she was approaching the more formal question as it would be asked by the classic critics of political economy, Marx and Engels. She opens up the question of reproduction in the following terms.

The literal meaning of the word ‘reproduction’ is repetition, renewal of the process of production. At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we all can understand—why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. But in the sort of repetition that we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features.[8]

Rosa Luxemburg opens up her book with the statement that reproduction is not repetition, as it seems to operate in the logic of Althusser’s (admittedly incomplete) understanding of the concept. Instead, the continual process of production must be understood as being a distinct problem. I want to look at two basic notions that she develops in this understanding of the reproduction of social capital in order to bring them into the discussion of the reproduction of capital as it occurs in everyday life. The first main issue is that of the conditions that it takes to ask the question in the first place. The second deals with the expansive nature of capitalism.

Luxemburg argues that in order to ask the question of reproduction, production must reach a certain level of productivity. Or as she puts it, “Reproductions is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society’s supremacy over nature, or in economic terms, a certain standard of labor productivity.”[9] This is not perhaps the language that would be used to explain the phenomenon today, but it gets at the point that in order to ask the question of reproduction, one must pass over a certain level of scarcity. For Luxemburg, this requires placing the ability to supply the basic necessities of life outside of the contingencies of the non-human, into the realm of the social, otherwise one is only dealing with the bare form of repetition. This element becomes especially relevant when one remembers that the question of social reproduction only gets its full hearing within the context of post-scarcity late capitalism, the point when capital subdues a rebellious labor forces by providing it a living standard that is considerably above the subsistence level.

The second important feature that Luxemburg brings into the picture of reproduction is the issue of expansion. This will become the more important of the two features. As Luxemburg notes,

Capitalist methods of production do more than awaken in the capitalist this thirst for surplus value whereby he is impelled to ceaseless expansion of reproduction. Expansion becomes in truth a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the individual capitalist… A growing tendency towards reproduction at a progressively increasing scale thus ensues, which spreads automatically like a tidal wave over ever larger surfaces of reproduction…. For the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death.[10]

The uniqueness of capitalism is that it must continually expand in order to survive. Luxemburg captures the ruthless nature of this necessity. Capital is the sovereign figure of this system, not the bourgeoisie. But for our purposes, one can never understand the nature of reproduction of capitalism within static terms. There must be a continuous expansion of the system. Unlike other systems of production, capitalism thrives on the crisis produced by its own contradictions. It must continually absorb that which seeks to destroy it. Luxemburg shows how this produces the logic for the colonial venture, capital needing to continually incorporate its other, the non-capitalist in order to survive. I want to argue that this same ruthless expansive nature must be understood in order to understand how the reproduction of a social order works, it must both incorporate non-capitalistic relations into its structure, and more importantly for us, it must make its resistances productive as well.

This brings us to the question of the feminist and queer politics of the 1970’s and the way they act as a form of countersystemic politics. My understanding of this has been driven by both Negri and Wallerstein’s understanding of the revolution of 1968 as something that both opposed the U.S. hegemony, but also opposed the older models of countersystemic movements that failed to destroy it. The first thing that we must understand is that these modes of politics developed in a certain context. Before we discuss the nature of these movements, the ways that they tried to reroute the circuits of capitalist reproduction, not at the level of grand narratives, but at its more intimate spaces, the spaces that had been so assiduously neutralized, I thought it would be best to draw out the basic political preconditions for these movements. And I should note that we are discussing movements primarily in the U.S. and Europe.

The period that we are discussing is the post war era. I am not going to go into all of the details of the structures and changes that defined that era, but rather I am going to discuss the sections that directly impact the movements that I am discussing. The first thing that should be noted is that the era is defined by a backlash against the radical workers’ movements that were in effect in the 1930’s. This backlash is most strongly defined by McCarthyism, the attempt to drive women out of the workplace, and the continued enforcement of structures of white supremacy. In effect, the political movements had been placated by the offer of a decent wage and the creation of a family structure that had only been enjoyed by the upper echelons of society. By in large what I am driving at is there was a shift in living conditions in a large section of the working class, that was allowed through the destruction of a radical political project. So that while I take socialist feminism as a serious political project, I reject its self-narration of creation. The politics of the period were not created so much by the inadequacy of a marxian politic so much as its destruction.

What followed from there was a new terrain for a politic, one that was less defined by necessity of reproducing everyday life, as reshaping what that would constitute. We can return to the comment that Luxemburg made in The Accumulation of Capital. One can only think about the question of reproduction as such at the point of a certain level of security. That security had been obtained, but only at the cost of generations of radical politics and experience. Many of the substantial problems of New Left politics came out of that amnesia. At the same time, the situation created new possibilities for new forms of social relations and taking advantage of that accumulation. It is notable that the radical politics of the New Left were the first not to be defined by necessity.

As I stated in the general overview of the period, the post war period was defined by a return to a certain structure of household economy. This household economy is defined by women fulfilling the reproductive role of caretaker in the household, a neutralized position that allowed for the continuance of production while not being acknowledged as being a part of that productive process. This restructuring occurred through a great deal of state planning and action. One can find its creation in both official state institutions, and in the influence put on women’s publications. Obviously, this was not a universal condition for women in the United States, but it did act an ideal blueprint for the production of the household, in the same way that Foucault proposes that we read the panopticon for disciplinary society.

To push this into a discussion of the feminist movement, it should be noted that Betty Friedan was involved in writing for the women’s magazines that aided in drawing up some of the blueprints for this structure. She was able to produce her work due to a somewhat privileged position concerning the enforcement of the new household economy. She was able to then put a name onto the system of labor and drudgery that was being effaced under the term, the domestic. At the same time, the political movements of the time, whether we are talking about the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, or the New Left in its broader structures, tended to replicate this division of labor unthinkingly. Women filled the positions in these organizations that were crucial to the day to day operations, but positions that were devalorized as meaningful labor. So, in effect, the problem that Frieden identified was considerably more contemporary than many writers at the time would recognize.

The first initial response to this structure was the consciousness raising session. This took form in both liberal feminist circles and in response to the deficiencies of New Left politics. The model drew from practices used both in black power circles and in the Chinese Revolution. To get a sense of the power that was found in this structure, I point to the words in the Socialist Feminist Reader. “They proved to be a supportive forum for discussing the liberation of women, personal and political experiences, frustrations with movements for social change that were supposed to be different from the rest of the world, and insights about domination and oppression that had fallen on deaf ears in the new left.”[11] The consciousness raising session became a powerful vehicle for organizing and rerouting the political desires of a new collectivity.

However, we should probably recognize that there is another model that could be drawn as a precedent for the consciousness raising session, and that is the confessional. This structure as Foucault points out is based on a certain “will to knowledge.” This structure, far from being absent from the post-war family, was animating feature of it. This family structure can be properly called post-psychoanalytical. The structure had been successfully transformed from a structure of alliance into “a whole series of tactics that combined the body and that of regulating populations.”[12] The structure of consciousness raising was successful, not because it was in revolt against the modern family, but precisely because it used its libidinal structures to its advantage.

This is not to say that the movement was tricked into using these methods or that it was trapped into a mode of false consciousness, but that it could only engage in a process of subjectivization based on the modes of subjection that had created its members as subjects. The interesting element of the feminist movement was ultimately not its narrative of liberation, but the way that it brought out a whole series of power relations outside of the neutralizing element of the private and pointed out that those relations were crucial to the constitution of capital. The field of the reproduction of the household became a site of contestation. The intensity of this politic is best captured by a comment about the relationships developed in the Bread and Roses collective.

From the perspective that the personal is political, almost everything in women’s lives was a potential target of struggle. Women were changing in many contexts: in friendships, in self-image, in sexual relations and the experience of sexuality, in work and new forms of competence, in the imagining and creating new alternatives.[13]

We find a radical politic here that is defined not by the mystified destruction of the structures of reproduction, but by rerouting them to create other forms of collectivity, other forms of subjectivity. This in turn lead to a whole series of political projects that ranged from attempting to recognize the labor of the household as crucial to the production of labor power, to child care collectives, and a whole range of other activities. It would be curious to try to write another History of Sexuality from the perspective of this resistance. I don’t think that it would radically change Foucault’s work, but it would be interesting to see what the differences are.

Ironically, I end on the note that initially made me think about this question in the first place, the question of the popular. As we have seen feminist politics and the queer movement (which I haven’t dealt with) have created new ways of thinking of family structures, de-emphasizing the nuclear family and presenting the possibility of other forms of kinship then previously available. One can go as far as to say that Gayle Rubin’s project in regards to this has been a success. Obviously the goal of destroying capitalism hasn’t been successful, but one cannot say the same for the structure of the family.

The way that I turn to the question of the popular is in a whole series of television series that define themselves precisely through these alternative sets of kinship. These television programs are defined by, in their most banal form, series such as Friends and Seinfeld, but they take more interesting political forms such as the series Queer as Folk and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These various programs, which may constitute a new genre, provincialize the nuclear family in order to emphasize a variety of other networks of kinship and care. This is obviously yet another appropriation, but I am curious to what its effects will be. It would be wrong to read this as an inherently depoliticizing gesture. After all, the latter two shows are to some extent defined by a political project. The question that I want to ask is to what extent does this new form carry the political energies of the former project? And perhaps more significantly, how will this effect the ways that new forms of subjectivization will come out of the new forms of subjection as defined by late capitalism?

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[1] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Volume II, Ed. and Trans., Joseph A Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 123.

[2] Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 443.

[3] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 132-133.

[4] Ibid., 169

[5] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),119.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] Ibid., 122.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Routledge, 1951), 3-4.

[9] Ibid., 4.

[10] Ibid., 12-13.

[11]Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen, “Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: An Introduction”, in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Ed. Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), 6.

[12] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),146

[13] Annie Popkin, “Social Experience of Bread and Roses”, in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Ed. Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), 185.

The Rise of Science Fiction as a Respected Genre

     I just came across this early attempt to formulate my intellectual project for the dissertation.  I cut out most of the absolute nonsense to get at some of the early efforts to formulate a relationship between literary form and historical period.

      To turn explicitly to the question of post-war academics within the context of these transformations, it’s notable that the creation of an entire series of academic formations parallels the rise of the mass society, putting the ideological detritus into the center of the analysis of modern structures of power.  This includes the rise of film studies, comics, advertising etc.  (Barthes work comes to mind, but so does the work of the Cahiers du Cinema group or even the work of Delany come to mind.)  Science fiction itself begins to transform in stature during this period.  It moves from primarily being published in pulp format as cheap periodicals to the novel format, both in paperback and hardcover format.  At the same time, the begins to rise a series of critical works on science fiction as a genre moving from the fan circles to respected academic circles.

            Science fiction then operates as one of those commodities produced within that society, but it also needs to be understood as a critical discourse of that society, particularly about the linkage between domesticity and consumption that was constructed in the post war period.  Science fiction had its roots in the traditions of ethnography, travel literature, and the utopia, all of which focus on questions of social reproduction and the social symbolic by posing questions about the customs of a society, its norms, its rituals, the ways that children are raised, and marriage compacts are arranged.  It posed questions on how societies perpetuated themselves, and perhaps more significantly, it posed these questions about the other in order to critique or denaturalize the assumptions of the societies that they lived in.  (Anderson points to this in his Imagined Communities, another place to look is in the material produced by Clifford in his analysis of ethnography and surrealism)  Science fiction contributes to these frameworks a sense of futurity, posing alternative futures, pointing to the contingency of the present, and at times, explicitly critiquing it.

            Science fiction moves from the margins of the society to much more respected position in the literary world, and at the same time, it begins to be re-evaluated as a genre, by both its practitioners as well as its critics.  Its status as both a product of mass production and as a discourse centered on the questions of reproduction put it in a unique position to critically examine the society it exists within.  Furthermore, its emphasis on contingency allows for the critique and re-imagination of a set of practices perceived as both natural and trans-historical, and allows for a critique of capitalism precisely at the moment in which McCarthyism has taken away many of the tools to make these critiques.  In addition, the feminist nature of these works allows for the exploration of the importance of the newly constructed space of the domestic in the reproduction of capital, both in its role of creating norms and expectations and in its role of assuring the market for a variety of mass produced items that insured the stability of Fordist capitalism.

            The intention of this project is to explore the way that feminist science fiction allows for first a critique of contemporary capitalism, and a series of imagined world systems that no longer operate within the logic of the commodity through a series of critical utopias, however in order to be able to map these resistances, one first needs to understand the relations of power in existence in order to establish this structure.  Women’s magazines become a unique space to map out these transformations, as they bring together a set of disparate discourses from the 19^th and 20^th centuries together to produce a sense of the domestic, far more coherent and homogenous than earlier formation, one that could only exist at a point of the level of social equality introduced at the end of the Second world war.

.  The literature on women’s magazines in the period of the war and the post war period has operated within the analytical structure of repression and agency, Betty Friedan making the argument that the post war period is far more repressive than the imagery of the war and beforehand, defending her readings through a set of stories contained in these magazines (which magazines?) whereas the work of Joanne Meyerowitz and Eva Moskowitz argue against this interpretation, focusing on both the ways that those magazines don’t fall into the trap of the Feminine Mystique, as well as the ways that there is a greater continuity between the work of the 1930’s and the 1940’s.  (My suspicion is that Meyerowitz’ interpretation may be shifted through Horowitz’ critical biography, that looks at the Popular Front influence on Friedan/Goldstein.  In addition, I have some minor methodological issues with Meyerowitz, particularly with her connection of magazines, such as AFL’s monthly magazine to women’s literature).  This repression/agency argument also doesn’t offer as full an argument as the linkages that Friedan’s work has with other critical works of the post war period, such as C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, and Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.

            To return to the subject at hand, my intension is to offer a different analytical framework than is offered by the one implicit in that dyad, one that follows Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, and insists on the productivity of power.  In some sense, I am following the model of continuity between the period of the war and the post war period, but I am focusing on something else, the way that these magazines were linked up to the war effort, more specifically the effort for women to support this effort, pushing their energy towards a war that took up incredible amounts of resources of the country, which was the primary contribution to the war effort.  (Aka the United States was transformed into a giant factory)

            I don’t want to read this engagement in an uncontradictory fashion. Contained within this effort towards total war are two projects, one directed broadly towards a social democratic project, the other directed towards the re-entrenchment and intensification of capitalism, that is to say, we find a project that continues and expands the Keynesian politics of the new deal, that is Roosevelt’s attempt to ‘save capitalism from itself’ vs. the imaginary of the people’s war.  I have no intention to argue that these imaginaries are autonomous from each other, certainly the party’s refusal to support strikes after the entrance of the USSR into the war and its support of the Japanese internment camps puts it into a profoundly ambiguous situation.  But this precise ambiguity is to be expected, precisely by the entanglement of power and resistance that Foucault writes about in his analysis of modern structures of power.

            As a side note, the contradictions of the popular front project are significant to its collapse.  I have already noted that the Communist Party compromised itself through the support of detention camps, and the refusal to support the labor struggles during the war (along with the disgraceful support of the Nazi-Soviet pact.)  Similar contradictions compromised the unions tied into the popular front project through the tension between the desire to protect the jobs of men who went to war and the jobs of the women who had entered into the war effort.  Alongside real narratives of repression of the left, we also have to remember the sense of betrayal that activists such as Betty Friedan and the sense of betrayal that African American members of the Communist Party felt as the party responded to McCarthyism by narrowing its vision of social justice.

            It’s important to remember that the victory of the war was met by massive strikes in the post war years.  I believe that this points to the power of the popular front imaginary and its continued commitment on the part of large numbers of ordinary Americans.  It is within this context that the project to destroy the political organization of the popular front.  It becomes a way to rescue the new deal from the more radical set of alliances that it made to succeed, that is to say, the radical trace contained in the effort to save capitalism, contained in the alliance between the communist party and the new deal democrats.  But the post war effort needed to continue to keep the economic engine in motion even as it as it neutralized the possibility of radical social transformation.  This need for continued mobilization can be linked to the commitment to Keynes economic theories that emphasized the need for economic demand and consumer spending to the continued health of the economy

            My interest is to begin to look at the space of the domestic as place in which grounds this new formation, linking the cultural, economic, social, etc., more specifically how Women’s magazines become a space to conceptualize and form this space creating intersection between capital, consumers, and later, the state.  But before that, perhaps it would be best to define the space of the domestic, and its importance.  Many commentators have already noted the reliance of the domestic space to stabilize the social order (bring up examples) At the same time, the definition of that domestic space was transforming.  As Nancy Walker notes, “By 1940 the domestic was commonly understood to mean work performed to sustain the daily needs of family members, which rarely included servants or livestock; professionals largely took care of the ill and the indigent, and while a housewife was expected occasionally to serve as hostess, the etiquette of calling cards was a thing of the past (Walker 55)  In addition, electricity was being introduced as a standard feature of housing.  This shift in expectations creates a far more homogenous domestic space through this narrowing of expectations.  Sally Stein makes the analogy of the techniques developed in the space of the domestic with the transformations in the workplace that were created by the new manufacturing techniques introduced by Henry Ford.

            The women’s magazine has an important role in the developing structure of the space of domesticity.  Although, it’s important to recognize that there are a number of significant texts dedicated to domestic advice, the women’s magazine were only begun in the 1870’s and 1880’s.  The connection to commerce was always fairly immediate.  Several magazines were initially started as catalogs, and publications put a great deal of explicit focus on consumption, as the space of the domestic was transformed from a space of production to one of consumption.  The magazines also began to cultivate a set of experts to offer commentary and direct the energies of the household.  (this needs to be spelled out a bit more.)  The United States government took an active role in the structure of those publications with the beginning of the Second World War with its propaganda department.

            While I read this shift in resistance that occurs within the period after the initial terror of McCarthyism as one that occurs under erasure, or as an effect of censorship.  But I want to read that concept of censorship within the framework that is provided by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams.  Freud sets up a set of terms crucial to his understanding of the psychic apparatus, condensation, etc.  In order to make these formations coherent and understandable to the reader, he brings in an analogy with political censorship.  He notes.

            The political writer who has unpleasant truths to tell to those in power finds himself in a similar position.  If he utters them openly the ruler will suppress his words—retrospectively if it is a question of words spoken, preventatively if they are to be made known in print.  The writer has the censorship to fear: and so he moderates and distorts the expression of his opinion.  According to the degree of severity and sensitivity of this censorship, he will find himself forced either to just hold back on certain forms of attack or to seek allusively instead of in plain statement, or he will have to conceal his objectionable views behind a harmless-seeming disguise—he may, for example, tell of incidents involving two mandarins of the Middle Kingdom, whereas he has the bureaucrats of the Fatherland in mind.  The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching the disguise and often the cleverer the devices which nevertheless put the reader on the track of what is really meant.

            Freud begins by noting that censorship doesn’t only have a simple repressive impact on the work of the author, that is to say, while the destruction of words does occur, the imprisonment of writers, etc.  Freud is interested in another effect of censorship, the one that occurs at the moment that the author in some way internalizes these norms, whether out of fear or as an obstacle to be avoided.  It is precisely at this moment that the author transforms his or her discourse to escape the direct effects of censorship, in effect, censorship then transforms the terrain of the political conflict.  Freud sees this shift as a sort of semiotic game between author and reader, manipulating signs in order to complete circuit of communication.  But, this transformation doesn’t simply repeat the earlier statement.  In effect, censorship can no longer be understood purely within repressive terms, and must be understood as a sort of constitutive force, each new act of censorship leading to a new web of discourse in order to escape its effects, leading to an open ended production of language.

            McCarthyism and anti-communism produced such an effect in the post war era of the United States, closing off both the political forces of the Popular Front as well as the radical demands contained in that formation.  Within that situation, there was a desperate effort to create a new language, a language that would escape the censoring effects of anti-communism and produce a critique of the new modes of domination introduced by the new Keynsian paradigm.  The first model became a demand for inclusion into that system, which included the critiques of poverty offered by critics such as social democrat Michael Harrington that eventually informed the war on poverty, or the demands made by the early civil rights movement, which demanded access to the new wealth and political participation in the society.

            A second set of critiques came up at the same time, which posed the abundance of the society as a problem, rather than scarcity.  Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, the sociological work of C. Wright Mills, and later on, the formation of SDS were all examples of this formation, and feminism fit this model as well, especially when one looks at Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which allowed for the creation of a new women’s movement to come together.  Friedan had been involved in the popular front as both an activist and as a journalist, although she wound up in the suburbs after the collapse of that formation.  Friedan’s critique made the figure of the middle class (generally white) housewife as her central figure of analysis, a product of suburbanization, the increase in wealth, and the desire to produce a stable nuclear family.  This critique has been critiqued for who got left out of its analysis, women in poverty and women of color in particular, but if you think about the book as a critical analysis of a new class formation, one that included a large percentage of the entire society, rather than a work on women as a whole, it becomes a much more productive historical document.

Notes on the Post-War Period

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique opens with her identification of a gap or lacunae in the dense network of discourse surrounding the household, a gap identified with the yearning of women. 

            “For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers.  Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity.  Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents.  They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents….  A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity.  All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (Friedan 58)

             The unnamed problem discussed by Friedan is defined by its dialectical opposite, the utopian promise of an expertise created through a dense discourse of scientific and technical expertise, in the form of technical manuals, psychoanalysis, and social convention.  Friedan gestures towards an intense instrumentalization of the household through the construction of a dense web of discourse.  The care of the bourgeois family is mapped out in painstaking detail, through the minutiae of childcare, the management of resources, and most of all, the affective economy of femininity.  Friedan recognizes the intense social, political, and economic pressure being put on the newly reconstructed household, intuitively recognizing the radical shift in the economy of the family in the post war years described by Stephanie Coontz.  The figure of the mother can be found at the center of that nexus, linking shifts in political, social and libidinal economies.  Rather than following Friedan’s repressive hypothesis, I want to read the ‘feminine mystique’ as the symptom of the intensification of the body of the white mother, transforming her into the guarantor of the stability of not only the household, but the nation itself, linking to the creation of what Stuart Ewen calls consumer social democracy as well as introducing the working classes to the regime of sexuality.  These hegemonic structures along with the expansion and reintegration of the white supremacist order were intended to legitimate and reinforce the logic of capitalist accumulation.

            Within that economy, ‘expertise’ and ‘yearning’ are mutually constitutive, operating within a sort of dialectical relationship.  In her recognition of the dialectical relationship between ‘expertise’ and ‘yearning, Friedan implicitly develops a sort of class analysis, recognizing a common set of experiences between (white) women centered in the psychic, social, political, and economic structures of the household, which crossed ostensible class barriers.  The labor of the household becomes a central locus of complex set of techniques of population, legitimizing the Fordist regime of accumulation, and perhaps more significantly, operating as a locus meant to stabilize the social reproduction of the newly expand regime of accumulation.  In effect, the structures of affective labor and forms of consumption are central to mitigating the alienation of the workplace, continuing a regime of consumption, but perhaps more significantly, reproducing the population.  The mother becomes the focus for this web of discourse not because of irrelevance as Friedan occasionally thinks, but because these modes of unpaid labor are central to the regime as a whole.  That centrality, in turn, produces the modes of resistance gestured towards in Friedan's choice of language, 'yearning.'  Feminism becomes the primary, but not exclusive form of resistance to this regime. 

          In their work, Empire, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the current regime of accumulation is increasingly defined by modes of affective labor.  I'm interested in exploring the role that feminism as a form of counter-conduct to Fordist capital and the various attempts to appropriate those forms of counter-conduct coagulate into the current regime of accumulation.