The Birth of Revolutionary Power

Birth of Our Power: Victor Serge. Gollancz, 1968.

Reviewed by Rob Campbell

Victor Serge is one of the writers of previous revolutions whose work is presently having something of a revival in young radical circles. He is a writer of total revolutionary committment, who presents work as an artistic and political totality. The sixties and early seventies, although decades of turmoil and genuine political unrest, so far as the countries of advanced capitalism are concerned, have failed to produce fiction of enduring standard from the turmoil. The reasons for this no doubt lie to a large extent in the nature of the radical movements themselves — fragmented coalitions of disaffection rather than revolutionary movements concious of themselves in that role. Serge belongs to a different age but one that has lost its literary imperative no less than his subjects lost their political imperative.

Birth of Our Power begins with a failed uprising in Barcelona in which the narrator participates, clearly paralelling Serge's own experience. The uprising has an air of unreality about it — being postponed for an important bullfight — and acts as an example for the revolutionary activity which falls short of revolution. The attention passes, through a lengthy internment in a French internment camp, to where 'our power' has at last been born — Bolshevik Russia. The dialectic of the three phrases is mediated brilliantly through the experience of the narrator, always in terms of his human contact with those around him.

Serge (his real name was Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) had revolution in his blood. "On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings," he recalled in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, "there were always portraits of men who had been hanged". He lived his life with living portraits such as those in Birth of Our Power, with the knowledge of future hangings in their hearts. Writing was Serge's means of expressing such an existence. He wrote his first novel Men in Prison after a five year prison term to "free myself from this inward nightmare, as well as the performance of a duty toward all those who will never so free themselves."

The revolution flows on within him and without him. Serge takes into his philosophical/literary practice Lenin's concept of the actuality of revolution, that is the understanding of the total process of social development as a revolutionary. As he writes in Birth of Our Power, "Nothing is ever lost.... Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city".

Birth of Our Power, as a novel of the revolution is a part of the revolution. It is now available in a 280 page hardback edition for only 90 cents from the Salient Office. The book is being distributed at this low price by Project Books, a left-wing book grouping, Box 704 Auckland.

A Different View of the History of Women

The First Sex: by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Penguin 1972, 382 p. $1.70.

Reviewed by Jill Brasell.

"Women are the race itself...... the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought."

This is just one of the hundreds of provocative statements contained in Elizabeth Gould Davis's controversial book, "The First Sex".

Davis's book is based on a double thesis: first that thousands of years ago, before the earliest recorded civilisation there existed a great civilisation which had a matriarchal social structure.

This is not mere speculation, but the result of extremely well-documented research. Concentrating mainly on the second part of her stated thesis — that matriarchy is the primary form of human society, and women have been the major civilising force since the dawn of humanity — Davis backs up her assertions with evidence from archaeology, anthropology, mythology, literature, philology, and history. She uncovers a mass of facts that will fill most female readers with a mixture of exhilaration and rage: exhilaration at finding out that the depressing versions of history and biology we learnt at school were full of lies about women, and our inferior status is not ordained by nature; and rage that the truth about our heritage has been hidden and discredited for so long.

Popular belief, nourished by biblical myth, holds that men are the human norm form from which women were modified, whether by God or evolution, to perform a reproductive function. Davis however, tells us that, on the contrary, "man is but an imperfect female". The Y chromosome that produces males is a deformed and broken X (female) chromosome.

"The first males were mutants, freaks produced by some damage to the genes caused perhaps by disease or a radiation bombardment from the sun." That the Y chromosome has a negative effect is borne out by the fact that females are freer from birth defects and congenital diseases, free from colour-blindness and haemophilia, and generally physiologically tougher than males.

Another pillar of the patriarchy that Davis destroys is the familiar image of the hairy caveman leading civilisation out of apehood and on to civilisation by inventing the wheel, discovering fire, pottery, agriculture, animal domestication, tanning and all the other crafts that first set human beings apart from the animals. In fact, it was woman who was responsible for all these vital discoveries, while man was occupied with the relatively unimportant task of hunting.

Davis cites evidence of the high status of woman in classsical Greece and Rome, and vindicates many great women who masculine historians have either consigned to oblivion or turned into laughable curiosities. One such woman was Boadicea, the warrior queen of first century Britain who by contemporary accounts was highly revered by her people and feared by her enemies, but who lives in history only as an "unnatural virago".

The masculinity of God is accepted almost without question in our present society, but the first deities of humankind were invariably female. The well-known "words of God", "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth", were in fact adapted, like much of Genesis, by Jewish priests in the sixth century BC from an ancient Babylonian scripture that began, "In the beginning Tiamat brought forth the heaven and the earth... Tiamat, the mother of the Gods, creator of all." Davis also cites many instances where the Jewish patriarchs' attempted to rewrite the ancient scriptures, so as to disguise the original matriarchal nature of their culture, and where this lead to inconsistencies. The Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges has remained relatively intact, despite Deborah's high status, only because it is a prized Jewish literary gem.

The early Christian church, which in its fanatical patriarchalism had set out to annihalate the goddess-worship still widespread in Europe, found itself forced by popular demand, and in order to ensure its own survival, to recognise Mary as divine. It was not to Jehovah or Jesus that the classical gods fell, but to Mary, and the rapid spread of Christianity from that point is attributable to her.

A large section of the book is devoted to detailing the abominable way in which women were treated by the early Christian church in its ruthless efforts to win the masses over to its patriarchal ideology. Davis offers this as the sole reason for women's present subjection, without even attempting a political analysis of sexism. As her analysis is never political and this is obviously not her field, Davis is perhaps wise to keep to what she knows rather than weaken the credibility of the whole book by drawing false conclusions. However, neglecting to mention any other factors contributing to the downfall of women, Davis places a rather disproportionate emphasis on the role of Christianity in this process.

I was lucky enough to pick up a preview of "The First Sex", but haven't seen any copies around the local bookshops since then. Keep asking for it, place orders for it, make the bookshops and libraries get it, because in spite of my minor reservations, I feel this is one of the most important feminist books to emerge for some time. For anyone who thinks there's nothing new to say in support of women, for anyone who wonders why we need women's studies courses, and certainly for everyone with any interest in feminism at all, "The First Sex" is compulsory reading.