feminist mode of analysis makes it clear that patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, forms of social interaction, language—all exist for us as historic givens. Our daily lives are the materialization at a personal level of the features of the social formation as a whole. The historical structures that mold our lives pose questions we must respond to and define the immediate possibilities for change.19
Although we recognize that human activity is the structure of the social world, this structure is imposed not by individuals but by masses of people, building on the work of those who came before. Social life at any point in time depends on a complex of factors, on needs already developed as well as on embryonic needs—needs whose production, shaping, and satisfaction is a historical process. Developing new selves, then, requires that we recognize the importance of large-scale forces for change as well as that the people we are trying to become—fully developed individuals—can only be the products of history and struggle.20
This history and struggle necessitates the creation of a new collectivity closely linked to the creation of new individuals, a collectivity which fundamentally opposes the capitalist concept of the individual. The creation of this new collectivity
presupposes the attainment of a “cultural-social” unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated, and experienced that it becomes passion).21
Clearly, we can only transform ourselves by struggling to transform the social relations which define us: changing selves and changed social institutions are simply two aspects of the same process. Each aspect necessitates the other. To change oneself—if individuality is the social relations we are involved in—is to change social institutions. Feminist practice reunites aspects of life separated by capitalism and does so in a way which assimilates the intellectual aspect to passion. As Marx said: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”22 This process of self-changing and growing in a changed world leads us to a sense that our lives are part of a number of larger processes and that all the aspects of our lives must be connected.
The Importance of Totality
By beginning with everyday life and experience, feminism has been able to develop a politics which incorporates an understanding of process and of the importance of appropriating our past as an essential element of political action.23 We find that we constantly confront new situations in which we act out of our changed awareness of the world and ourselves and in consequence experience the changed reactions of others. What some socialists have seen as static, feminists grasp as structures of relations in process—a reality constantly in the process of becoming something else. Feminist reasoning “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.”24 This mode of understanding allows us to see the many ways processes are related and provides a way to understand a world in which events take their significance from the set of relationships which come to a focus in them. Thus, we are led to see that each of the interlocking institutions of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy conditions the others, but each can also be understood as a different expression of the same relations.25
Since each phenomenon changes form constantly as the social relations of which it is composed take on different meanings and forms, the possibility of understanding processes as they change depends on our grasp of their role in the social whole.26 For example, in order to understand the increased amount of wage work by women in the United States we need to understand the relation of their work to the needs of capitalism. But we must also look at the conditions of work and the kind of work prescribed for women by patriarchy and white supremacy as different aspects of the same social system. As feminists, we begin from a position which understands that possibilities for change in any area are tied to change occurring in other areas.
Both capitalism and socialism are more than economic systems. Capitalism does not simply reproduce the physical existence of individuals. “Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part … [and this coincides with] both what they produce and how they produce.”27 A mode of life is not divisible. It does not consist of a public part and a private part, a part at the workplace and a part in the community—each of which makes up a certain fraction, and all of which add up to 100 percent. A mode of life, and all the aspects of that mode of life, take meaning from the totality of which they form a part.
In part because of shifts in the boundaries between the economic and the political and because of the increasing interconnections between the state apparatus and the economy (through means as varied as public education and government regulation of industry), it becomes even more necessary to emphasize that one can only understand and penetrate, and transform reality as a totality, and that “only a subject which is itself a totality is capable of this penetration.” Only a collective individual, a united group of people “can actively penetrate the reality of society and transform it in its entirety.”28
Feminism and Revolution
If all that I have said about feminism as a method rooted in dealing with everyday life holds true, what is it that makes this mode of analysis a force for revolution? There are three factors of particular importance: (1) The focus on everyday life and experience makes action a necessity, not a moral choice or an option. We are not fighting other people’s battles but our own. (2) The nature of our understanding of theory is altered and theory is brought into an integral and everyday relation with practice. (3) Theory leads directly to a transformation of social relations both in consciousness and in reality because of its close connection to real needs.
First, how does a feminist mode of analysis make revolution necessary? The feminist method of taking up and analyzing experience is a way of appropriating reality. Experience is incorporated in such a way that our life experiences become a part of our humanness. By appropriating our experience and incorporating it into ourselves, we transform what might have been a politics of idealism into a politics of necessity. By appropriating our collective experience, we are creating people who recognize that we cannot be ourselves in a society based on hierarchy, domination, and private property. We are acquiring a consciousness which forces us, as Marx put it, “by an ineluctable, irremediable and imperious distress—by practical necessity—to revolt against this inhumanity.”29 Incorporating, or making part of ourselves, what we learn is essential to the method of feminism.
Second, I argued that a feminist mode of analysis leads to an integration of theory and practice. For feminists, theory is the articulation of what our practical activity has already appropriated in reality. As Marx argued, as struggle develops, theorists “no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.”30 If we look more closely at the subject about which Marx was writing on this occasion—the British working class—we find that by the time Marx wrote these words that group had already developed theory out of its practice to a considerable degree. A variety of trends had emerged, and ideas about organization and politics had been diffused over a wide area. Isolation from experienced national leadership, and the overimportance of personalities created problems, but the facility with which English working-class people formed associations is impressive. They used a variety of forms taken over from Methodism, friendly societies, trade unions, etc. By the time Marx wrote, it was clear that most people understood that power came from organization.31
In looking at history, one is especially struck with the number of false starts, the hesitancy, the backtracking
