IMAGES OF FRATERNITY

...He is rarely young...

...For those prepared to listen, the recent wave of feminism has reminded us that solidarity is not exclusively work-based...

...by the Associated University Presses...

...when they insisted that all women be compelled to wear it, the women of the Society of Revolutionary Republicans were staking their claim for their rights and duties...

...The world we now inhabit seems markedly individualistic...

...Instead of class solidarity we have seen a more mongrel variant, in which class and brotherhood are subtly elided...

...Getting a wife was both proof of success (who but a master could afford to marry) and guarantee of future prosperity (how else would you find the sons to work in your workshop...

...73 By contrast, the main areas of growth have been in sectors that rely heavily on female labor...

...by Steven Lukes, will appear in our Spring Issue...

...Our ears are now more finely tuned to the tensions of sexual division, and when the longing for unity is expressed in terms of men, it begins to strike a discordant note...

...darity rather than division, working together rather than alone, collective rather than individual action...

...But while you were still a journeyman, women were largely out of bounds...

...So the fraternity of the working class is reduced to that of workingmen, and the sisterhood of women can be reduced to that of the "good sisters...

...A. Phillips, Hidden Hands: Women and Economic Policies (London: Pluto Press, 1983...

...The crucial starting point is not to glorify the past...

...Thus it has long been a complaint against capitalism that it turns what should be social into an individual affair...

...Whatever solidarity we build on for the future must rest on a new foundation...

...As it was, she argued, the revolution had legitimized inequality...

...Class unity became the prerogative of male workers...

...But for most of us there is a positive as well as pragmatic side...

...Socialists would never define their objectives solely in terms of liberty and equality: the finest liberty and most scrupulous equality would still be inadequate if they left us isolated and alone...

...But there were other women, more vocal in their support of the revolution, who also claimed their rights as women...

...All those industries that gave us our picture of the trade-union brother—the mines, steel, ship-building, the docks—have faced massive retrenchment...

...and it has released a vitality often absent from more conventional mixed movements...

...For reasons too complex to discuss here, capitalism fell far short of its early promise and failed to deliver the homogeneous working class...

...The unity that did develop was considerably narrower than that envisaged by Marx and Engels, and it was concentrated mainly among male manual workers...

...the expansion of health and education services has meant more jobs for women...

...Socialism draws much of its intensity from such experiences, and the suggestion that these are passing will arouse deep concern...

...So large units of production have been favored over smaller ones, and not just because of economies of scale...

...Capitalist industry had little time for the finicky distinctions of the feudal world, and as it asserted its dominance, workers found their similarities beginning to outweigh their differences...

...Greenham Common is not a prototype for all future action, any more than was the male bonding of manual workers in the past...

...Was no voice raised to suggest that fraternity is far from universal when it defines itself as a brotherhood of men...

...A socialist society would be one in which we developed our common concerns...

...The typical worker of the future will not be a burly man blasting away at the coal face...

...Olympe de Gouges was one of those to speak out against racism, arguing that fraternity must challenge the despotism of color...

...But they were aided in their imaginative leap by a partial redefinition of "working class" as male...

...But we also value the very process of working together, tending to the view that this is a good in itself...

...We will never secure alliances between men and women, black people and white people, white-collar workers and those in manual trades, if we deny the conflicts that rage between us...

...the move69 ment to create such a society would be one of cooperation...

...In contrast to the abstract fraternity of the French Revolution, this was a brotherhood premised on real similarities, and perhaps because of this, it all the more firmly excluded those who were different...

...Solidarity can divide as well as unite, and some of what we have lost we should be glad to leave behind...

...In 1791, for example, the market women of Les Halles donated funds from their corporation (or guild) to the national treasury, and they were thanked by the president of the Assembly in the following terms: Mesdames: It is not one of the lesser benefits of the Constitution to have destroyed the spirit of individual corporations, so as to make of all Frenchmen only a family of brothers closely united by the indissoluble and sacred bond of Fatherland...

...But note too that what replaced these remnants was a fraternity of men...

...When the revolutionaries raised their cry of "fraternity" they thought to distance themselves from the closed world of feudal France —but traditions have a nasty habit of reasserting themselves...

...Capitalism encourages us to keep ourselves to ourselves, to do the job, take the money, then spend it as we will...

...Yet for many feminists today sisterhood is fraught with tensions...

...It draws the boundaries between my family and yours, pulling us inexorably into its ghettoized confines...

...In criticizing the concept, I am not proposing that we abandon all it represents...

...There was, however, no room for them as sisters...

...71 the National Convention declared that the aristocracy of skin was as abhorrent as the aristocracy of birth, welcomed three delegates from San Domingo (including one ex-slave), and announced that slavery was henceforth abolished in the French West Indies...

...The "social" in socialism has always had at least two senses...

...We may be willing to cooperate with those we see as alien, but we will reserve our affection for those of our own kind...

...Socialism has always invoked some vision of community and usually frowned on unrestrained individualism...

...Like its masculine counterpart, sisterhood appeals to a sense of shared experience and claims a unity that is more than shared ideas...

...We should not act as if the only solidarity worth its name is the one that unites through every aspect of our existence...

...Women do share a common identity as women, but we are also divided by our different situations: middle-class women from workingclass women...

...of course, they still have primary responsibility for the children...

...the bond that drew them together was their shared experience as men...

...heterosexual women from those who are lesbians...

...the back-to-back terraces contained all the frustrations of poverty as well as the comforts of belonging...

...When journeymen swore loyalty to their fellow "brothers," they were also swearing hostility to those outside, and rival compagnonnages (brotherhoods) were often at each other's throats...

...instead of common conditions and wage levels for all, a systematic demarcation between the skilled and unskilled, high paid and low paid, black and white, "middle class" and "working class...

...Whichever growth area we name, in public services or in the private sector, in manufacturing or in commerce, it is almost invariably associated with female employment...

...Admittedly, they found few followers in this, and indeed made themselves extremely unpopular among the women of Paris...

...If fraternity was to mean anything, it must extend to all men...

...In the mere 15 years of the contemporary women's movement, women have made an extraordinary—and I believe irreversible— mark on our culture...

...Family imagery was a recurrent feature of feudal life, in France as elsewhere in Europe, and in the centuries before the revolution, brotherhood was the other side of the more authoritarian patriarchy...

...That women should break up into smaller groupings, each focusing on different issues and campaigns, is not in itself a problem...

...It has given women a new confidence...

...They could perceive their basic likeness through all the distinctions of trade and country, but how were they to recognize themselves in the experience of women...

...Against all the odds—despite the isolation of motherhood, the female competition ingrained in our culture, the relative powerlessness of women workers—women have managed to organize...

...This aspect of the tradition has been attacked as illiberal and oppressive, and socialists differ over how much importance to attach to it...

...Logic, surely, may tell us that this is impossible, that in the long run your interests are identical with mine...

...Rather, we should think of socialist unity as a complicated— maybe even painful—construction from many different solidarities, some of which will inevitably be in conflict...

...Partly this is no more than efficiency: to change the world we need the weight of numbers...

...If I am right in thinking that such workbased unity is beginning to lose its power, we have to look to alternative sources of solidarity...

...I want to reassess in this essay the tradition of fraternity, arguing against any simple strategy of rehabilitation...

...It has tried to transcend the other differences between us, but to do this in ways that give weight to our individual experiences...

...The unity was premised on exclusion and, even more worrying from my point of view, it was a unity derived from a womanless world...

...More impressive still, they brought together journeymen from a variety of trades, spanning the closely guarded boundaries of the medieval world...

...He is nonetheless instantly recognizable—a somewhat burly fellow, of middle age and determined expression...

...When we hear talk of the old boys' network, or the clannishness of the old school tie, we do not (I hope) thrill to these exhibitions of community spirit...

...We talk forlornly of the old backtobacks [row houses] with their bustling street life, compare them wistfully with the anonymous high-rise tower blocks of today...

...We should, I believe, abandon the search for a single model, discard our last dogmas on the typical "worker...

...What brings us together may be similarities in our work lives, but it may equally be similarities in our home lives...

...Engineers are employed to drive the trains on time—and whom or what they carry has nothing to do with them...

...The analogy with the family makes it clear: this is something deeper and more intimate than voting the same way in meetings...

...Those inside have sometimes found themselves locked in bitter dispute...

...Capitalism has not created a homogeneous working class and, for the foreseeable future, is unlikely to do so...

...When "liberty, equality, fraternity" was proclaimed in 1789, fraternity was already stamped by an earlier history...

...However grand the "brotherhood of man" once sounded, today it is out of date...

...monks were brothers...

...Unlike the earlier journeyman, this brother is not inducted through complex rituals...

...black women from white women...

...the thrill of counting union banners from every trade and region...

...he is never a woman...

...As so often, the language of kinship is employed to assert a powerful emotive bond...

...As long as we can play with the model of the family, it is hard to resist these finer discriminations...

...Of course, a few women camped outside an army base will not change history...

...But the other side of this is moralism...

...The interests of workers in employment might be met by policies that condemn those without jobs to continued unemployment...

...so too were Freemasons, who flourished in 18th-century France...

...On this occasion we can hardly plead historical naiveté, since the revolutionaries were indeed informed of the universal implications of brotherhood...

...But the conventional images stress other aspects and make it hard for women to enter the fraternity...

...Add to this the fact that women's jobs are often in services rather than manufacturing, in offices rather than factories, and we can see their double disqualification from the fraternity of working men...

...He is celebrated in every labor-movement poster and recorded in all our histories of working-class struggle...

...the aspirations of some women could perhaps be met by changes that leave the rest of the women stuck where they were...

...The mechanics of the market put a barrier between us, leaving little space for cooperation or concern...

...Unity premised on family likeness can be a recipe for disaster...

...Like so much in our lives, politics demands a certain romance, and the harsh logic of self-interest is rarely enough to move us...

...Socialists do their best to resist nostalgia, but even the strongest will quail before such images...

...The life of a journeyman was that of a single man, who roamed from town to town in pursuit of his trade...

...of course, they still depend heavily on male earnings for their survival...

...As they argued in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism seemed to be destroying the previous basis for division and distinction...

...When they do work at home, they are isolated from the unifying experience of socialized production—and patronized for what is seen as their narrower vision...

...Instead of internationalism we have witnessed strident forms of nationalism...

...In 1794, for example, they were forced to recognize that if all men are brothers, it is nonsense for some men to be slaves...

...Craft masters claimed their authority from their role as "fathers...

...But the division of labor has often been more than that, and a difference of emphasis has sometimes been accompanied by mistrust...

...If the women's movement has shown anything, it is that there are other kinds of unity and other forms of power...

...challenged the elitism of much of traditional socialist politics...

...it appears to begin with, it ends us up in trouble...

...when the enemy is so pervasive it is hopeless to fight on every front at once...

...The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations...

...we cast around in trepidation for some surviving signs of collective feeling...

...Yet as long as fraternity remains our model for solidarity, and fraternity continues as the prerogative of men in manual trades, we shall be left with little to say...

...women with children from those without...

...I share this concern, but I also worry that it can make us uncritical of what went before...

...We are not all the same, and the pretense that we are will not help us to change our world...

...Think of the way the women of Greenham Common have transformed the debate over nuclear weapons, and compare this with the 75 empty slogans of those who say that "only workers' power will stop the bomb...

...When journeymen formed illicit brotherhoods, they were in some ways prefiguring the later trade unions: the brotherhoods found jobs for their members, arranged accommodation for journeymen on their weary trek around the country, and even put pressure on masters who tried to cut wages or worsen conditions...

...of course, the women who take such actions are untypical...

...Women were not slow to make similar points for themselves...

...We are inspired (much less often than we would like) by public demonstrations of solidarity...

...Fraternity as subsequently developed by trade unionists was to tell a different story...

...But when they agitated in 1793 for women to wear the national cockade, Levy et al., Women in Revolutionary Paris, p. 92...

...Self-help, self-interest, self-protection, these seem the catchwords of today...

...even a brotherhood of men seemed a farfetched idea...

...But they did at least draw the necessary implication...

...As a model of solidarity it is flawed and partial, celebrating the unity of men and exclusion of women...

...It is because of this that we experiment with collective living, and exhibit such a marked propensity for going to meetings...

...Sisterhood suggests that we can forge 74 a deep and lasting bond, so when our differences threaten to prevent this, they can generate the intensity of defeat...

...The tricolor was the symbol of the republic and the badge of citizenship...

...This produced its contorted moments...

...Women could appear in this world in the guise of "mothers"—and indeed the women who ran the compagnons' boarding houses were usually addressed as such...

...Another essay from the book, "The Future of British Socialism...

...As a basis for future action it is increasingly anachronistic, ignoring major changes that have occurred in the composition of the labor force...

...As a skeptic might put it, socialists prefer to share their cake in a dingy canteen rather than divide it into equal pieces for each to eat at home...

...Yet women have identified with Greenham Common on a massive scale— and opinion polls show how radicalizing this experience has been...

...Olympe de Gouges was a minority voice, and her complaints could be discredited as those of an antirevolutionary...

...These workers did indeed come to see themselves as part of a working class (and to this extent the Marxist diagnosis has been vindicated...

...The old centers of male employment have been devastated...

...here in Britain] he may—if he's struggling overseas—be black...

...Yet the composition of the British labor force has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, and conventional ideology needs to move fast if it is to catch up.' Since the Second World War women workers have been creeping up toward the half-way mark in the official labor force: after decades when they were only 30 percent of it, they have moved steadily up to 40 percent...

...what can be a unifying bond has often dissolved into division and unease...

...Admittedly, it had taken the revolutionaries some years to reach this conclusion and when they did, it was with a cynical eye to the chances of mobilizing ex-slaves to defend their territories against Spanish or British invasion...

...the investment of multinationals has been in those high-technology areas that typically employ women...

...It is here that we can learn from the women's movement...

...the interests of people in one country could conceivably be met by defense policies that threaten those in other countries with nuclear war...

...Within the women's movement, sisterhood has certainly acted as a powerful emotional bond, bringing to our political lives a warmth and affinity we usually reserve for what is private...

...Those outside the movement have often felt excluded by the atmosphere of sisterhood, sensing that there are more criteria for membership than simply being a woman...

...She also wrote in 1791 a Declaration of the Rights of Woman...

...Enslaved man" had freed himself, but "having become free, he has become unjust to his companion...

...The characteristics associated with fraternity were all derived from the male model of work and play: it took place outside the home, in the dirt and danger of the workshop or the camaraderie of the pub...

...The lesson rather is that there are many different ways of working for a better future, many forms of solidarity...

...their first responsibilities are to the home...

...In all these cases there is a powerful belief that more social means better...

...of course, the majority of women would find it impossible to join them there...

...The ideal has been soliThis essay is reprinted (ana very slightly condensed, eliminating a few local references) from Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, edited for the Fabian Society by Ben Pimlott and published by Heinemann Educational Books, in London, with whose kind permission it appears here...

...Not the false fraternity that constrains us to a family likeness, but that more complex unity that stems from facing those conflicts that can divide us...

...Fraternity, solidarity, even cooperation look sadly out of place...

...As a model for socialist solidarity, such a hectic fraternity left much to be desired...

...In campaigns and debates on virtually every aspect of our existence, we have shifted our perceptions of what is possible and what desirable...

...she is much more likely to be a service worker employed in a wellventilated, dirt-free office...

...In Wales all the major economic trends have been concentrated in one small area and in an abbreviated time span.' The overwhelmingly male sectors of coal, steel, and slate have taken a sustained battering...

...when pressed to explain themselves, kings tended to play the same card...

...Rewriting the constitution to read "woman" instead of "man," she pointed up the irony of a declaration that proclaimed the freedom of men and remained silent on the slavery of women...

...Mass meetings have been favored over ballot boxes, and not only because they give greater weight to the opinions of activists...

...We worry (perhaps more than we should) over our privatizing tendencies...

...Communal child care has been favored over caring for children exclusively at home, and not merely because it means less of a drain on the energies of parents...

...Eighteenth-century France hardly lent itself to the vision of an all-embracing unity...

...on numerous criteria (the proportion of old people in institutions, the number of young people who leave their hometown in search of work) communities are now more stable and caring than they used to be...

...It identifies a common heritage, some shared experience that sets us apart from the rest of the world...

...But against these progressive aspects, they generated an intense division between one brotherhood and another...

...The difficulty is that "sisterhood" does not ease the transition to a more sober recognition of what divides us...

...Positive as G. Williams, "Land of Our Fathers," Marxism Today, August 1982...

...The family metaphor has a lot to do with this...

...We recall the mining communities where workers shared their poverty and danger, then shudder at the new towns with their semidetacheds and their holidays in Spain...

...Yet we had our reasons for turning to such models, and the problem of solidarity remains...

...In some parts of the country the transformation has occurred at such breakneck speed that it is predicted that women workers will outnumber men by the end of the century...

...It was this, of course, that inspired Marx and Engels to their vision of a united and classconscious proletariat...

...A young woman was no comrade, but rather the prize the journeyman might seek at the end of his travels...

...they wanted a fraternity of all brothers in a single nation...

...But manual workers have slid down toward the half-way mark: twenty years ago, two workers in three were in manual jobs, but now this is closer to one in two...

...The mining communities were, after all, never typical of working-class existence...

...Fraternity in particular has a richly archaic ring, and I want to argue we should leave it that way...

...Every one of us will have some emotional memory of collective action, or some evocative dream of future unity...

...The declining industries have been largely industries that used to be male...

...There are reasons why we thrill to those moments of unity, and reasons why we despair when they seem to elude us...

...In a remarkable moment of revolutionary fervor, ' D. G. Levy, H. B. Applewhite, M. D. Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789 -1795 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 54...

...This kind of fraternity had both its positive and negative aspects...

...But wherever each of us draws the line— between the public and the private, the social and the individual—there can be no doubt that the tradition as a whole values the social...

...We have, perhaps, fond memories of the extended family where each generation played its role, and we shake our heads at its nuclear substitute with granny condemned to an old people's home...

...instead of unity between the sexes, a continued—and in some ways intensified— divide...

...Socialists had good reasons for believing that solidarity is created at work, but bad reasons for claiming this as the only site of political strength...

...Socialists have challenged such individualism, and this is one of the points at which we diverge from classical liberals...

...Sometimes it will remain an empty phrase but when it does become real, it becomes divisive and often is reduced to a minority of those it claimed to unite...

...It is more testing to be a good sister than a sound political ally, and more distressing to fail in affection than to fail in political will...

...Of course, many of these new women workers work part-time...

...n thinking about where to go from here, it is worth noting that neither the addition nor substitution of "sisters" solves the problem...

...they too were making the point that women must be citizens...

...Did no one note this oddity...

...Her Declaration took the form of an appeal to the queen (in the much mistaken belief that Marie Antoinette could be persuaded to speak in the name of all women), and in 1793 she was executed as a royalist sympathizer...

...Hence the brotherhood functioned as a community for single males...

...The problem perhaps is this: in the early years of a movement we can be swept into a single identity—"black is beautiful," "sisterhood is powerful"—but once that first wave of self-assertion is over, the cracks will inevitably appear...

...Female challenges to male fraternity were still few and far between, but the challenge was there—however easily dismissed...

...some of what we feel we have lost is better left behind...

...Out of this melting pot a new solidarity would surely be forged, and it would be based on the common concerns of class instead of those of trade or nation or gender...

...On the face of it, the revolution pursued a new ideal, one closer to that of Rousseau...

...to end poverty we need the power of socialized production...

...The books is to be published in the U.S...

...The exclusively female Society of Revolutionary Republicans made no overt criticism of male bias in the constitution—indeed, its members took upon themselves the role of defending this constitution against the . bacicslidings of the new moderates...

...Workers did come to see themselves as brothers, not in the abstract phrases of the "brotherhood of man" but as real, live, working men...

...But logic looks a poor substitute for the emotive bonds of fraternity...

...society was too complex and divided...

...But if we hope to build solidarity on a firm foundation, we have to start from a clear understanding of the differences that divide us...

...Crucial as the problem of solidarity is for socialists, we must first acknowledge the defects in our previous traditions, then see what alternatives we can develop...

...Economic crisis since the mid-1970s has partially disguised the trends, but the underlying pattern is nonetheless clear...

...Women workers also get their hands dirty, and the exertions of domestic labor often far exceed those of "heavy manual work...

...Patriarchy was the dominant model for authority, and fraternity was its (largely uncritical) 70 complement...

...Some of the old traditions were tainted and divisive...

...there are no elaborate ceremonies to mark his membership in the group...

...Unity premised on simple similarity can be powerful but in the end restrictive— attractive but in the end destructive...

...It has broken up the "old local and national seclusions and self-sufficiency," making "national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness" ever more impossible...

...None of these depressing features should obscure the fact that women are nearly half the labor force, and that our images of solidarity must adapt themselves to this...

...Trades and professions typically organized themselves into corporations or confraternities...

...We feel hemmed in by a world of self-interest, and we experience the daily weakening of those bonds of class and community that gave the socialist movement so much of its strength...

...the decentralization of office work has favored women workers...

...Women, she suggested, should qualify for every duty and every privilege now claimed by the men: they had the "right to mount the scaffold" and should be allowed the equal right to "mount the rostrum...

...However we employ it, the metaphor of the family seems to carry its own logic...

...Health, education, banking, electronics, computers— whichever we mention, the story is the same...

...Sometimes it will be simply a common commitment to social or economic change, cutting across considerable differences in the way we live and the jobs we do...

...Brothers could recognize one another across oceans and continents because what they had in common was greater than what kept them apart...

...Particularism and exclusivity were anathema to these revolutionaries...

...Throughout the 19th century, fraternity continued on its varied career, and with the development of the European labor movements it began to take on heavily masculine flesh...

...Instead of the old complex of brotherhoods and guilds, there would be a new community where individuals united as citizens, with no subgroupings to deflect their common interest...

...Those who mourn the lost community are often on shaky ground, with an overromantic view of the past and unnecessarily bleak picture of the present...

...Socialists believe in coordination, arguing that conscious planning will serve us better than unregulated competition...

...As far as fraternity itself is concerned, we should surely start with the admission that solidarity is not socialist in all its forms, that there are versions of it that repel as well as ones that attract...

...When they go out to work, they are treated as temporary migrants from their home territory, and still denied the status of real "workers...

...Social ownership, socialized production, even socialized consumption are regarded as positive goals...

...Trade unionists, we know, are still brothers and send fraternal greetings, but now that one [English] trade unionist in three is a woman such language has come increasingly under fire...

...Whether the ideal be sisterhood or brotherhood, the language of siblings imposes its own constraints...

...It has proved impossible to sustain a united women's movement, and for the present at least the "movement" is largely wishful thinking...

...For many the formative experience was on demonstrations, rallies, or picket lines: we remember the confidence we gained from marching with thousands of others...

...The fraternity of the French Revolution was undoubtedly male and exclusive, but compared with later manifestations, it was still a pretty feeble affair...

...new sectors employing women have arisen in their wake...

...It does not promote a caring society, and reserves its greatest praise for those who "go it alone...

...This may well be the logic of movements, and in itself no cause for concern...

...Builders, to take one example, are paid to build—and whether they erect houses for the homeless or yet another office block is no concern of theirs...

...Women are thought of primarily as wives and mothers: their first task is to care for the children...

...We are, I think, right to reject a politics based on self-interest: this is too fragile a foundation for what we want to build...

...With all their determined universalism, the revolutionaries overlooked their sisters: in this case, not so much overlooked them, but even thanked them for their services to the family of man...

...In consecrating today to the public cause what previously had been only a symbol of union between a few individuals, you give a new proof of [that] patriotism which had distinguished you since the beginning of the Revolution: Note how the "spirit of individual corporations" and the "unions between a few individuals" are now dismissed with scorn...

...And all this has come from a movement that lacks the basic strengths of trade unionism, lacks in particular the unity of purpose that is daily reinforced in the experience of socialized production...

...Of course, solidarity as practiced has never been exclusively male, but solidarity as imagined has taken its images from the trade-union brother...

...72 o what happened...

...Capitalism, Marx and Engels argued, was fast diminishing all those distinctions of skill, age, gender, nationality, payment that once so miserably divided us...