Oldal 419 [419]
SIMULACRUM OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
Socialist Party) failed to attract young female members because the difference
discourse cannot be successful mobilization frame in a universalist frame
especially when other alternatives emerged. The revival of the conservative and
extreme right wing mobilised women in the framework of politics of motherhood.”
In that framework the politics of motherhood women could find structural
support for securing the family and a rhetoric which offers symbolic recognition
of unpaid care work with the concept of women’s dignity. The rhetorical frame
of maternalism by the victorious conservatism is not questioned neither by the
neoliberal “new feminism” of the young generation who believe that they alone
are the source of their own success and they refuse to pay for the failures of others
or acknowledge that these are structures factors causing discrimination nor by
the ideologically uncertain MSZP which in principle staged itself as the successor
of the social democratic values. The categorization for “men” and “women” as
political agents worked in the early 1900, but it remained unresponsive to the
political and intellectual shift towards developments of identity politics from
the 1960s. The simulacrum of social democracy attracts the elderly voters with
nostalgia, but it does not work for the younger voters who are moving towards
other alternatives. As a consequence, in the social democratic movement women
necessarily are ghettoized into the women’s section where they are also fighting
for the same agenda of women’s difference but in a framework which does not
offer them visibility publicly or the acknowledgement of gender difference. The
members, middle aged and older, white women are as unfit for coalitional politics
as were their fore-mother, the social democratic women in between 1945 and
1948 without the threat of dissolving themselves in the political agenda defined
by others. And today these “others” are numerous. Therefore, coming up with a
feasible strategy for the future is not easy. The social democrats are advocating
socialist internationalism in an era where the alternatives are polarized around
the axis of cosmopolitanism. They are advocating “women’s politics” when the
identity politics of the 1980s is already a part of history textbooks and without
coalitional politics the chances of success is limited.
In Europe women’s demands has changed during the past century: emphasis
moved from needs to rights, not independently from the success of the social
democratic movements earlier and within this, from the restricted right to parity
in selected areas to the larger right of self-determination. This crucial shift was
5 Pető, Andrea, Die Marien in der Sonne (Die Apokalyptischen Madonnen), in Johanna
Laakso (ed./Hg.), Frau & Nation / Woman & Nation, Finno-Ugrian Studies in Austria 5,
Wien, LIT-Verlag, 2008, 137-174. and Petö, Andrea, Anti-Modernist Political Thoughts
on Motherhood in Europe in a Historical Perspective, in Heike Kahlert - Ernst Waltraud
(eds.), Reframing Demographic Change in Europe. Perspectives on Gender and Welfare State
Transformations (Focus Gender), Band 11. Berlin, Lit Verlag, 2010, 189-201.
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