THE FIVE FINGERS OF SOCIAL DESIRE
1 IA
In addition, while the oppressed are often de-skilled, they are also taught
to forgo their own developmental desire. In many societies, women are
encouraged to engage in vicarious expressions of desire, nurturing the
development of children and men. Viewed as less developed than the mature
male capitalist subject, for example women are often described as being closer
to nature; a nature that is in turn portrayed as lowly and static, deprived of
developmental, self-organizing properties. Accordingly, women, like nature,
must await the ‘animating principle’ of man and his technology and intellect in
order to develop or grow. As Simone de Beauvoir points out in The Second
Sex;
only elite modem man can ever hope to gain development,
or
transcendence over the alleged stasis and repetition of the natural world.21
Women and the rest of the oppressed must remain within immanence, or
within a state of unending latency, without any hope for development.
Developmental desire becomes oppositional when people begin to
acknowledge and elaborate the development which they have achieved. In
1936, the “Mujeres Iibres,” an anarchist organization of “free women” who
fought in the Spanish Civil War, established self-development as a central focus
in women’s revolutionary work. like most social anarchists, the Mujeres Iibres
regarded the transformation of the self as crucial to the transformation of
society 22 Transcending a Marxian oriented ‘needs agenda,’ the Mujeres Fibres
asserted women’s desire for social freedom, working to develop new skills and
abilities while fighting to create a qualitatively new society. In particular, the
Mujeres Iibres established capacitacion,, an agenda which prepared women
for revolutionary engagement, and captation, which incorporated women into
the libertarian movement. This dual orientation was expressed clearly in its
statement of purpose:
...to create a conscientious and responsible female force [originally, a
“revolutionary force”] that can act as a vanguard of progress; and to
this end, to establish schools, institutes, conferences, special courses,
etc., designed to empower women and emancipate them from the
triple enslavement to which they have been, and continue to be,
subject, the enslavement of ignorance, enslavement as a woman, and
enslavement as a worker.23
Through an agenda of captation, women focused on developing their
participation within anarchist organizations. Due to the widespread neglect of
women’s issues by the larger anarcho-syndicalist movement, the Mujeres Libres
addressed social and economic oppression that specifically affected women,
working to overcome those obstacles, to integrate women into the wider
revolutionary movement24 In turn, through capacitacion,, women expressed
their desire to reestablish their capacities for both social and self renewal.