Oldal 417 [417]
SIMULACRUM OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
impoverished country and its voters. Ihey also proved vulnerable when faced
with new politicizing methods, like communist party members sabotaging the
sound system of their public rallies, introduced by the communist. The traditional
Social Democrat political culture based on the value of democracy, which the
communists were so jealous of, was rather a disadvantage than otherwise when
it came to the struggle for the mobilization of the workers, especially the young
ones and the winning over of the peasants. On the 1st May celebration in 1945
the social democratic women were marching together with men wearing white
blouse, dark skirts, and red tie, while the communist women were marching
separately from men wearing red and white dotted headscarf. This difference
in style and appearance was reflected in how sexual difference was handled by
these parties. With the merge, which in practice was a takeover of the social
democrats by the communist, the necessity of politics was victorious over the
mission of progressive politics. Gyorgy Marosan (1908-1992), the legendary social
democratic leader turned to be loyal communist responsible at that time for the
women’s section in the party, who often solved conflicts that came up in women’s
meetings with consciously masculine gestures — by slapping the table, or shouting
depending on the situation — recognized the essence of the matter: “Somewhere in
the neighborhood a new type of person is forming, someone who runs factories,
a politician, a statesman, a soldier: the socialist woman. What will men who are
very left wing, at least verbally, do if ten years on from now a woman appears who
does not wish to remain a servant?” The end of the social democrat women’s
movement by merging with the communists in 1948 is perhaps one of the reasons
that this question has still not been even asked why politically engaged women
were subordinated to the class struggle.
The construction of dominant masculinity was never questioned, and the
sexual binaries of man and woman remained fixed categories used in political
mobilization and in identity politics. The simulacrum was constructed, and it
was only a question of time when it will fall into pieces as the map of the empire
in the story by Borges while the problems of gender inequality continued to exist.
During the “statist feminist” period the ideological anti-feminism of the
communist emancipation policy was based on the concept of class struggle. As
Miglena Nikolchina pointed out anti “statist emancipation” arguments felt into a
rhetoric trap as far as gender equality is concerned because it defined the workplace
as a site of equality.’ In the private realm gender relations were continued to
be dominated by traditional representations and expectations of femininity and
2 PIL 283/20/24. 102
13 Petö, Andrea, Hungarian Women in Politics, in Joan Scott - Cora Kaplan — Debra Keats,
(eds.), Transitions, Environments, Translations: The Meanings of Feminism in Contemporary,
New York, NY, Routledge, 1997, 153-161.
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